Leveraging the digital and traditional marketing to get maximum result for advertising campaign
By Ibidunni Banjoko
Digital is vital to the success of any marketing strategy. Or is it? This is a bold statement but one that looks at one side of the coin. Brands that really aspire to effective dominance in the market would need to combine digital with traditional marketing to effectively connect with the consumer.
Traditional media is a highly effective way to reach a broad consumer base, but digital media is a good way to reach a specific audience. Digital marketing is also used to build more relevant consumer relationships. In order to maximize your impact, it is crucial that you utilize both traditional and digital marketing.
Traditional media like newspaper, radio and television usually reach a wide and broad audience, but often targeting is limited. Thus, one of the high points of traditional media is that it allows you to broadcast messages widely. It also affords the gradual immersion into the psyche of the audience through repeated exposure.
However, digital has revolutionized the way consumers or prospective consumers and brands interact. Consumers, following the advancement in technology have moved online which they access through their smartphones devices, tablets, laptops and PCs. Thus, brand/consumer interaction has become more personal, specific, immediate and intimate.
Therefore, while traditional marketing still remains the best bet for targeting a generic audience or classes of audience, digital has come to stay. This means that not only has media changed, but so too has the consumer journey. No longer do consumers become aware of a product or service and then visit a store to make a purchase; they are becoming exposed to brands digitally. In their digital journey, consumers leave digital footmarks and data that assists advertisers to target-market them. There were more digital touch-points in the research and consideration phase than ever before, presenting a challenge for marketers to reach customers at every point of their digital journey.
However, because of the pervasiveness of digital marketing and the fact that it is the vogue, some advertisers may cleave to it to the total neglect of traditional media. This may prove to be costly at the end of the day. Hence, experts advise the maintenance of a balance of the old (traditional) and the new (digital).
To address the challenge of balancing traditional and digital media, we began to look at it through the lens of the consumer funnel. Consumers trust traditional media, and they trust brands that are associated with traditional media. Whether it is print, television, radio or outdoor, when consumers are familiar with your brand, they are more likely to convert when they see your digital ads. Don’t make the mistake of pulling back from traditional media completely to power your digital marketing.
The array of metrics available in digital marketing far surpasses traditional marketing. However, marketers often make the mistake of assigning credit to the last click or digital touch point, or using the same metrics to judge success between traditional and digital marketing. Traditional media will rarely drive as many phone calls as search marketing for example, but it will fill the consumer funnel and help your digital marketing perform better. Instead, judge traditional marketing by audience or impressions, and measure lift on overall site traffic, branded searches, and digital marketing engagement to monitor movement down the funnel.
Speaking on the subject matter, CEO, Papyrus Digital Solutions Limited Richard Iweanoge said: “Personally, every advertising platform has a benefit and it also has its drawbacks. For traditional advertising, let’s take newspapers for example. The most distributed newspaper in Nigeria, Punch, does about 250,000 copies daily. Let us assume two people read each paper, you are looking at 500,000 eyeballs on your ad. It has its merits for those who read Punch. It also has its demerits because you are trying to reach a wider audience of about 100 million people.”
“Take billboards, the most successful companies will probably have around 250 billboards across the country. That, from the budget point of view; you would be looking at over a billion Naira. How many companies can afford that? For billboards, you drive around, three-quarter of the time; you pay passive attention to the content of the board. So, it’s very good for brand visibility. But in terms of using it to sell, it has its draw-backs.”
He continued, “Take TV too, it is a fantastic medium with a wider reach; every household literally has a T.V. But if you dig deeper into the T.V space, then you begin to see that there is terrestrial, Satellite. You then begin to see the dichotomy in our society and then realize that the bulk of our people watch the terrestrial, the elites watch the satellite. So, where do you want to put your materials? You can see, it has its benefits, it also has its draw-backs.”
“Let’s take Radio. It has mass availability. Certain regions have taken to it a lot more than other regions. In the North, it is the primary means of communication. In the South, not so much, it is fragmented here. But still, a lot of people in traffic listen to the radio. But again, how do people listen to radio? Do they listen to radio actively or passively? I would submit that they listen to it passively except something catches their attention. It’s very good for brand recognition and awareness. Sometimes if you repeat the message over and over, people will begin to comprehend the message you are putting out there. It has a lot of reach which is why radio is very good in our environment.”
“And then, digital. The challenge in digital advertising is that you have to be online to be targeted. Still less than 40% of our mobile phone users are using data. So, your reach is still limited compared to the potentials out there but it has some advantages. With digital, you can target specific segments- sex, region, age group e.t.c. There are just so many ways you can slice and dice digital. But I don’t think we have reached a point where we are harnessing those potentials as much as we can. No one is better than the other. It is all around where it is at the point in time and how you want to take full advantage of that platform to reach the audience you are targeting.”
He continued, “In papyrus, we are a digital company. We said we will be digital first. We also agreed that we cannot ignore the traditional media because it is powerful. Look at your magazine (MARKETING EDGE), I can read it and it’s on my table, twenty visitors would come and they would look at it. It has a high pass on rate. We know we will play strongly in that space because we cannot ignore the traditional media. No one is better than the other. It’s just for you to decide as a business, how do you play in all, given the audience you want to reach? We intend to play both on radio and print. We probably won’t play too much on T.V because the type of solution we provide would not call for much T.V advertising.”
He further said, “Every platform has a conversion rate that they expect. For instance, on Facebook, it’s about 0.2 click through rate. If you can achieve or exceed that, then you are successful. If you use that as your matrix of measurement, then you temper your expectation to the reality of the platform. Whether it’s traditional or digital, it’s like fishing; you throw your net out there and hope to catch some fish. Majority of the fish will not get in there but some will. When I do a billboard, I expect some people will drive through and when they do, I might get 200 people who are captivated by the message and take action, that’s a 0.002 conversion rate. If I do a Facebook ad, I expect 2 out of every 1000 to get the message and actually do something about it. The conversion rate may be low but that’s the nature of advertising. You cast your net wide while you catch a few. Platforms will advise you frankly on what to expect. As long as you are doing up to the platform’s expectations, you are fine.”
“There is something noteworthy here. The segment of the society in Nigeria with a preference for traditional advertising is the segment with the spending power, which is the people you want. The youths will flock a lot to digital but they don’t always have the resources to take action. But the gentleman reading the Guardian or MARKETING EDGE, has the resources. If he sees a compelling ad, he is likely to take action. Traditional advertising still has the capacity for conversion a lot. But in another 20 years, a 16-year-old will be 36 years old and would have been empowered. We are in the middle of that transition now. So, they might not convert now but in 20 years’ time, they would be converting.”
In the same vein, Managing Director, SBI Media Limited Rotimi Bankole said, what applies in some countries may not apply in others. The story in developed or developing countries differs according to their level of development. “So when you say digital and traditional marketing, in digital, here we still have a long way to go. You can’t compare a country like Asian countries’ level of digital to what we have here in Nigeria. We are just trying to get there.”
“There are many things that inhibit the innovation of digital here says for example power supply, access to Data, Network failure but so far so good merging of digital and traditional is also a function of the type product you are selling to your client but if you want to take traditional marketing from the Nigeria system then it will take a while.”
He noted that the fastest medium to reach out to people and the most developing or growing media platform today as we are seeing it evolve every day, is digital. So you can’t take it away. If your business is about payment service then you can just go digital but there are some brands that are an infusion of the old and the new, so what that means is to allocate how to use the mix rightly and appropriately.
In his view, COO, SO & U, Biodun Adefila said, “We will benefit a lot if we can have both digital and traditional. Because many of our audience are going digital that does not mean traditional is not relevant to a particular segment of the economy and it would always be so. That people are leaning to digital does not relegate the traditional media; it depends on how effectively we mix the factors of marketing.”
“It also depends on who we are talking to that will determine where we should go and what we should be seeing in such places. Consumers don’t stay in one spot, they move. Their lives change, their beliefs change. So because they are moving targets, we also need to move along with them. When television came, people were saying radio was dead. But radio is not dead and is still alive effectively. It depends on how we adapt and integrate the platform” She added.
Above all, traditional and digital marketing work together, client and agency partners should have a holistic approach of the media mix, and a thorough understanding of digital marketing, which is no doubt crucial to any marketing campaign. Marketers and partners that focus on only one portion of the funnel will have limited ability to maximize effectives, or ability to deploy a comprehensive, Omni-channel campaign designed to drive results.
Traditional and digital marketing have the potential to transform your business through explosive long-term growth that can make you a powerhouse in your industry. Despite their waning popularity, a lot of people still read newspapers and periodicals like magazines. It may seem like a shot in the dark, but these old-school print media can work wonders for brand awareness
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