With well over 40 different types of marketing strategies at your disposal, how can you determine the most effective route to reach your customers?
Many agencies would have you believe that there is a magic way to increase conversations, whether they’re pushing Facebook advertising or improving your SEO, print advertising or direct mailers. Here at t&s we have a tried, tested, and results driven approach. Which is why, over the last 7 years, we have been building and expanding a team of digital experts who work alongside our talented Designers and Account Executives to bring you an end-to-end strategy to help grow your business.
We have worked with a number of clients, across a range of industries, who wanted to achieve higher conversions; whether to increase job applications for their sector or to help spread awareness for the launch of their fledgling business. Our team works together to bring clients a holistic approach and deliver positive results utilising the most effective tools, resources and mediums to achieving your objectives.
Take our project with South Western Ambulance Service ‘Proud To Be 111’ as an example. The client was looking to attract prospective candidates to work within one of their call centres, and not only appeal to candidates outside of the emergency service but drive 60-70 candidates to open events. Using a combination of local press, radio and online advertising, these ads were served to 58k people, resulting in 2.5k unique website users, over 400 applications and 120 attendees to the open evening events, all within the first week.
Digital-centric agencies push the idea that online advertising is the be all and end all. However, there are pros and cons to both ‘print’ and ‘digital’ marketing avenues, and in our experience, using a combined approach is the best way to create a targeted message and optimise results.
What do you need to consider when combining the different marketing types? As a starting point, we’d recommend the following:
Scheduling
When you’re combining traditional and digital marketing, think carefully about scheduling. Create a yearly marketing calendar with key dates, whether that’s national events, or your own product launches. You’ll need to factor in deadlines for print demands in advance, whereas digital mediums can be done closer to deadlines. This makes digital resources the perfect companion to more ‘traditional’ marketing channels by way of retargeting and adaptive messaging.
If you can manage to collect data for your prospects of both residential/business and email addresses, then you can target them with mailout media and retarget them with email and social messaging using your email database as a lookalike audience.
At t&s, with our end-to-end approach, we have developed great relationships with external agencies to deliver printed media and direct mailers, as an example, with quick turnaround times. We also have an in-house team of talented graphic and digital designers who can produce assets on a campaign or ad hoc basis ensuring that, whether we work on a campaign or stand alone project, it meets, not only the highest of standards, but delivers the desired results.
Content
Do: reinvest and utilise content across multiple channels.
However you produce your content, whether it’s imagery or written, remember that one piece of content can be used across print advertising, social media and your website, giving you more return on the time or cost that you invested in it.
Don’t: copy & paste content.
You want to take your customer on a journey giving them prompts across multiple channels. If they keep seeing the same content that didn’t convert them the first time, chances are it won’t work next time. Split up written content into larger sections, headlines, snippets and questions. If you’re using the same image, try mirroring it and adding text over the top… you get the idea.
Our t&s digital team regularly creates online content based on printed marketing, and visa versa, to reinforce brand messaging and campaign reach. As an example of this, take a look at the Flexible.Ours campaign for Gloucestershire Hospitals, which covered both online and print advertising. This campaign had such a bold, clear and concise look that we were able to capture leads through both online and non-digital channels. This saw a 66% increase in internal temporary nursing cover, 37% increase in temporary healthcare assistance cover and an overall agency saving of £1.7m of NHS spend!
Targeting
You know your customers best and depending on their demographic, you’ll find them in varying places. Unless your marketing budget is in the billions then you can’t afford to spread yourself too thin. This is true for both online and off-line marketing. Take social media for instance, in the US 46% of people over 65 years of age are on Facebook but less than 3% use Snapchat, whereas 73% of ages 18-24 are on Snapchat and less than 20% are on LinkedIn. So choose your social networks carefully in order to target your audience effectively.
Importantly, the brief and objective should drive the most appropriate strategy, marketing type and medium. We would advise caution to using a singular or particular type of marketing simply because it illustrates a rise in engagement, sales or conversions for other organisations. It should always come back to the original brief. To always achieve the best results, a combined approach, which may include that new found medium, will ensure a greater success. At t&s we want your company to succeed which is why we would never make recommendations that we aren’t sure will give you the results you’re looking for.
To find out more about how t&s can help grow your business, fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
