Marketing Introduction
Marketing is one of the most critical components to a company’s success. Creating a strong marketing plan is no easy task, and can seem daunting at first. A strong team of marketers, clear goals, and the right tools to reach your goals are all components of a successful marketing campaign.
Whether your company sells directly to customers in a brick and mortor location, or an online E-Commerce with no physical location, hybrid marketing is an effective strategy to maximize your businesses potential sales.
What is Hybrid Marketing?
Hybrid marketing, sometimes referred to as omnichannel marketing, is defined as a promotional strategy that incorporates both traditional marketing and digial marketing.
Hybrid marketing strategies creates multiple avenues of reaching your customers, reinforcing your marketing efforts.
The first steps in creating a hybrid marketing strategy, are determining your companies goals for your new campaign, as well as who you are going to market towards to put together a target audience.
Determining which channel’s to pursue for both traditional and digital marketing is going to vary, depending on your target audience. In order to make these decisions, it’s important to understand the different levels of comfort with technology for different demogrphics.
When examining your target audience, one question is very important to answer before making any additional decisions. That question is: “Are my customer’s digital natives, digital immigrants or a mix of both?”.
Hybrid Marketing Target Audience
In order to understand your customer’s reception to different hybrid marketing channels, it’s important to have a clear understanding of if your audience are digital natives or digital immigrants. So what exactly are these digital identity’s? The terms were first introduced by Marc Prensky in 2001 and has been widely used ever since. Let’s take a look at what defines each of these digital demographics below.
Digital Native’s
A digital native is someone who has grown up in the age of digital technology, and is comfortable with computers, the internet, social networking and text messaging. Digital native’s are more inclined to see an advertisement on social media or receive a promotional text message, than seeing an advertisement in a newspaper or on a billboard.
Digital Immigrant’s
Conversly from a digital native, a digital immigrant is someone who was raised before the digital age. A digital immigrant is not particularly comfartable or knowledgable with computers, the internet, social networking and text messaging. Digital immigrants typically spend less time online than digital natives. This ‘offline’ lifestyle mean’s traditional marketing methods are most effective.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is defined as any form of marketing which utilizes offline methods to reach a company’s audience. Traditional marketing was the only option for businesses until the digital age. Offline marketing has many channels which can be effective on their own, but are even more effective when combined with digital marketing.
Traditional Marketing Examples:
- Radio Ad’s
- Billboards
- Newspaper Ads
- Television Ads
- Snail Mail or Traiditional Mailing
- In Person Product Demonstration
In Store Marketing
Digital and online marketing are going to play a significant role in your hybrid marketing plan. However, offline marketing is crucial to maximizing your hyrbrid advertising efforts. The use of in store or on location marketing can help increase customer loyalty as well as improve customer satisfaction.
Offering customer’s the ability to sign up for exclusive offers, discounts, promotions and updates with your SMS or email marketing campaigns during a check out process can greatly assist your digital marketing audience.
Print Marketing
Print marketing is probably one of the oldest channels of marketing. From newspapers advertisements, to billboards, print marketing has a long history of success, and is still able to produce results for most businesses.
Advertising with print can be used in many ways in today’s digitally dominated world. For example; E-commerce stores, or other exclusively online businesses can create printed advertisements to be placed alongside purchases inside packaging of your procucts. These printed materials can promote new products, ask for reviews, as well as thanking them for doing business with you. All of these are great ways to increase customer loyalty and increase future sales.
Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing is defined as the use of digital channels to market a company’s products or services to it’s audience. Digital marketing is a subset of an overall hybrid marketing plan, and one of the main ways to stay in communication with your customers, when they are not shopping.
Digital Marketing Examples:
- Email Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Infuencer Marketing
- Traditional Marketing
- Digital Coupons
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing (text marketing) has made a tremendous impact in the digital marketing realm. Where once email reigned king, SMS marketing has now taken over. Why has text marketing taken the top spot? Because it works. Text marketing boasts some incredible results:
- 98% Text message open rate
- 95% of Text Messages are read within 3 minutes of being sent
- 30X Return on Investment
- 91% of Americans prefer texts to voicemail
- 89% of consumers prefer texting with business to any other form of communication
The first steps for integrating SMS marketing into your current marketing plan is one that may be more simple than you would think. There are resources for successful beginner tactics as well as getting started guides available from CloudContactAI.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a similar avenue to SMS, and is typically one of the major digital marketing avenues. Email marketing is similar to SMS marketing, as it is low cost, requires minimal oversight, and can generate sales almost immediately. Incorporating effective Email marketing into your hybrid marketing strategy is a good fit for most businesses marketing strategies. What are some of the benefits of email marketing?
- 30x ROI
- 306 Billion emails are sent and received each day
- 64% of small businesses utilize email marketing
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How To Integrate SMS Into Hybrid Marketing
The first steps for integrating an SMS marketing channel into your current hybrid marketing plan is one that may be more simple than you would think. There are resources for successful beginner tactics as well as getting started guides available from CloudContactAI.
Email and SMS
One strategy is to use both email as well as SMS marketing together. For example, you could share your SMS opt-in links with an email, or share a phone number for your audience to text to be added to your texting list for promotional discounts and deals.
Social Media
Social media is a terrific way to share your company’s products and services as well as discounts or promotional offers. Another great way to utilize your social media presence, is to share your opt-in campaigns on social media, converting followers into an audience for SMS campaigns.
The Bottom Line
Whether your customers are digital immagrants, digital natives or a mix of both; hybrid marketing strategies has the potential to increase sales and help you reach your goals. Integrating SMS as a part of that hybrid marketing plan, is an effective, low cost addition which will help deliver the results you are aiming for.
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