How Digital and Traditional Media Marketing Can Work Together to Bring You Closer to Your Customer
By: Kimberly Grant
“Media” is a widely used term to mean a wide variety of things. There’s social media for people who like to socialize with people they know (and don’t know). There’s news media where many people get their information and entertainment in one place, like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
Let’s Get Media Specific
In marketing, there are two types of marketing media:
- Traditional Media
- Digital Media
Traditional media is loosely defined as the type of media many of us grew up witnessing. It includes TV commercials, radio advertisements, newspaper ads, and direct mail (brochures in the mail). This type of traditional media marketing has served many companies for decades.
This type of traditional media marketing is considered the push method. In the push method of marketing, companies are pushing their products and services to consumers. In turn, consumers are being forced to witness content they may or may not be interested in. This is a problem, because the companies are paying for ad space on TV, on the radio, and in newspapers and magazines. They were also bleeding money with no qualified leads.
Stepping Into the Digital Age
These days, the old way is not going to cut it. Consumers are bombarded with advertisements in so many different forms, across so many different media that we’ve become ad-blind. We see it and we ignore it. Getting consumer attention has become increasingly harder because of this.
With the advent of the various digital media, companies have found a way to advertise to consumers in a way that will get the right consumers’ attention for their particular product. For the uninitiated, digital media can be considered the use of digital technology to reach and interact with audiences across various platforms like Internet, email, social media, mobile, and even Google Search.
Getting to Know Your People
With digital media, getting to know your customer has become quite easy. It uses the pull method of advertising. In this method, companies can not only advertise to their potential customers. They can also inform people about their products and services, entertain them with product and service features, and they can even engage with their customers (read: listen).
This engagement leads to finding out what’s great and not great about your products and services via online reviews and company responses to constructive criticism and praise. In other words, digital media helps companies make their customers feel valued. It also brings companies closer to their customers to really enhance the customer experience.
Marvelous Example
All of the possibilities provided by digital media are as vast as the Internet. There are so many ways to reach people today that it seems like traditional media is a relic. This level of thinking is a fallacy. Digital media works best when it’s coupled with traditional media. This is because traditional media reinforces digital media.
It’s not official until there’s an example. So, here’s an example of how well traditional media and digital media work together. Let’s say you are sitting in the movie theater watching Spider-Man: No Way Home for the first time. At the end of the movie, you sit patiently, waiting for the Marvel teaser during the end credits. All of a sudden, you’re watching the trailer for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. This is traditional media, because you have no control over what you’re seeing and it is basically a commercial within a movie.
Now, you’re leaving the theater and you’re posting on your social media about how much you loved Spider-Man: No Way Home and tried not to cry during that scene in the movie. After you post your critique, you see an ad on your social media feed to pre-order tickets to the new Doctor Strange movie. This is digital media at its finest.
While digital media makes custom advertising easy on the eyes of the consumers and easier on the pockets of companies, traditional media should not be forgotten. When done correctly, digital and traditional media can facilitate lead generation that has a higher rate for conversion. For more insights on digital vs. traditional media, you can see Kayla Carmichael’s HubSpot article, “Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing”.
For more marketing insights from me, you can see my last post here.
