Two Worlds Collide: Why You Should Combine Digital and Direct Marketing

In this modern age, there are many business owners who are unsure of the direction in which they should market their product. Should you market your business using the tried and true direct advertising, or should you utilize its modern equivalent, digital marketing?

While both of these methods can reach a large pool of potential customers, neither will generate as much business revenue as one that uses a combined approach.

Traditional direct marketing blankets a target area with advertisements that take time to gather and analyze to see if they have been effective. This can be a time-consuming process for your business in the modern era. By utilizing digital marketing techniques, your business can become instantly aware of the impact your ads have on customers.

The instantaneous aspect of digital advertising gives you the ability to immediately respond to potential questions they may have about the product or service you offer and allow you to clarify any concerns that have arise.

Digital marketing utilizes a streamlined approach involving modern digital technologies that bring your product to a potential customer’s attention. As more consumers have turned to the internet to do the majority of their shopping, advertising has followed suit by targeting a customer’s interests in combination with your products offer.

Direct Digital Marketing

But to be efficient in today’s competitive market, your business should utilize both approaches when marketing your product or service. This approach can be delivered via three basic delivery systems: email, the internet, and mobile phones, with addressability as the common link that stitches these three components together.

For example, old direct marketing techniques used postal addresses to reach their customers; now there are email addresses. Often, as a potential customer surfs the internet, the sites they visit are recorded in browser cookies that track their particular interests and purchases. These cookies are then coded to the device in which the customer was using at the time, such as an IP address or mobile phone number. By having this addressability, your business will be better informed on how to direct its’ marketing toward potential customers and be able to instantly measure the results.

Advantages of Direct Digital Advertising

One of the main advantages of direct digital advertising is lowered overall costs associated with marketing your product or service. There are no resources wasted sending ads to customers who have no desire to purchase what you have to sell. Many companies use banner ads to direct traffic to their websites with the simple click of a button. This provides a tangible advantage over traditional digital advertising, since your ads are placed on sites relevant to what you are trying to sell. This allows you to target people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

Utilizing Direct Digital Marketing

One popular aspect of this advertising strategy is the customer-friendly approach to the delivery status of the intended product. When an item is purchased for home delivery, customers are made aware of the approximate date of arrival, but occasionally, this delivery may be delayed. When this occurs, the customer must spend their valuable time dialing up customer service or searching for a website to learn when their product will be delivered.The solution to this issue is to set up an easy to use tracking system where the customer clicks a customized link to receive the delivery status of their package. This will alleviate the concerns of many customers and is simple, inexpensive and easy to set up.

If you are running a service-oriented company, setting up appointment reminders with your customers will help them to schedule times of availability and help you avoid missing your customers. This system involves an email or text to your customer days before the service is to be provided, then followed up with another one hours prior to the appointed time. This improved timing between you and your customer will change your customers overall loyalty to the service and boost brand awareness and engagement.

Following your customers’ browser habits with cookies will allow you to tailor your site to specific consumers based on their web behavior such as click patterns or keyword searches. This information will allow you to target and personalize content to answer frequently asked questions or include additional information, turning a disgruntled customer into a satisfied one.

This new and fast growing frontier for advertising may seem difficult to implement and track at first. But with a bit of tech savvy, direct digital marketing will allow you to take advantage of the multi-channel, multitasking lives of your customers, and allow you to form stronger, profitable customer relations.