Integrating Traditional and Digital Marketing With a Digital Content Writer

Approximately 13% of marketers devote their efforts primarily to traditional advertising techniques, such as print, television, and radio ads. Another 60% focus their attention on digital marketing, including material created by a digital content writer for dissemination on the web. So, which approach is more successful?

It’s a trick question.

The fact is that the most successful marketing approaches combine both traditional and digital marketing techniques. This helps to reach the widest number of potential customers in the first place, then move them more effectively through the marketing funnel toward an eventual sale. Let’s take a look at why you should consider a more integrated approach, how to combine digital and traditional marketing techniques, and what role a digital content writer plays in your integrated strategy.

Why Should You Integrate Digital Content Writing and Other Digital Strategies Into a Traditional Approach?

Traditional marketing techniques include print ads, billboards, television spots, and radio promos. Though some marketers view them as outdated, these techniques can be very valuable. In particular, traditional marketing is effective at moving potential customers into the top of the marketing funnel by attracting attention and gaining interest.

Here is where such efforts can hit a snag.

Consumers find information about goods and services they want to buy by conducting research on the internet. However, they do not necessarily conduct the search immediately after seeing or hearing the ad, although mobile search makes this possible. Chances are, the follow-up web search for more information may not happen for several more hours or even days.

If you’re lucky, your potential customers remember your company name perfectly from your ad and enter it accurately into a search engine. However, it may be more likely that the prospects don’t remember your name exactly, but they remember what you do. Therefore, they may conduct a search for the goods and services that you offer.

Without a strong web presence with digital content optimized for searches, your company may not show up in the search results. This is where having a digital content writer comes in handy. Though every web search generates thousands of web results, a majority of users never scroll past the first page. This means that if you are not one of the top search results, you may as well not be included in the search at all.

The picture can get even bleaker. If you have competitors who have more successfully integrated SEO into their digital marketing strategy, their web pages are likely to rank higher in the search. Rather than scrolling through pages of results to find you, your customers are more likely to just click the top web result. Thus, your traditionally focused marketing can be very successful … at helping your competitors.

How Do You Integrate Digital Marketing Into Your Traditional Approach?

When it comes to integrating digital techniques into an existing traditional strategy, there is a right way to do it and a lazy way to do it. The lazy way is to create a lot of pages that include keywords to get search results but that offer no substantial content. These may get you hits, but they are unlikely to lead to conversions. Your customers are looking for valuable information, and if they can’t find it from you, they will go elsewhere for it.

Putting out content that is meaningful and helpful to your customers is more likely to convert leads into sales. However, maintaining a consistent publishing schedule of quality content is extremely time consuming. Hiring a digital content writer is one way to maintain such a schedule while allowing yourself enough time to tend to the other vital aspects of running your business.

Why Should You Integrate Traditional Marketing Techniques Into an Existing Digital Strategy?

Maybe you’re at the other extreme of the spectrum. You see traditional marketing as a thing of the past. You’re looking forward to the future, so you’ve devoted all your advertising resources to a digital content writer and online marketing:

• Optimized web design
• Extensive social media presence
• Online banner ads
• Link building

You’ve congratulated yourself for being on the forward edge of the digital revolution. There is just one problem: You are not seeing your leads convert to sales.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. One of the most recognizable brands in the world, Pepsi, took initiative early in the last decade to discontinue all traditional means of advertising and devote all their resources to a digital-only strategy. In an effort to stay closer to the brand message, Pepsi did all its advertising in-house, severing relationships with external marketing agencies in the process. Instead of buying television airtime during the Super Bowl, as it had done for 23 years prior, it devoted that $20 million to a corporate social responsibility campaign called Pepsi Refresh, promoted via social media. That campaign attracted a lot of attention but didn’t necessarily translate into higher sales.

Pepsi’s digital-only marketing strategy was a bold move. It lasted only a couple of months.

The theory behind it was that a digital-only strategy would garner a heavy social following that Pepsi could market to directly. However, the one-dimensional technique failed to target a large proportion of their existing audience. Since then, not all of Pepsi’s television advertising efforts have borne good fruit, but they have succeeded in reconnecting with their target audience.

What Makes Digital-Only Marketing Less Effective?

One theory is that the sheer volume of digital material is overwhelming. While using social media, your customers become saturated with tweets, trends, hashtags, campaigns, and promotions. It is difficult to keep up with it all. With so many brands and companies clamoring for consumer attention all at once, people tend to tune out even messages that they would otherwise be interested in and attentive to.

This theory demonstrates the importance of quality content, not just quantity. Whether it be a social media post or a longer-form piece, content created by professional article writing services may help to amplify your brand voice over the digital cacophony.

What Does a Successful Integrative Marketing Campaign Look Like?

Interestingly enough, we can look to Pepsi’s biggest competitor, Coca-Cola, for guidance on how to integrate traditional and digital marketing techniques successfully. A few years after Pepsi made its disastrous foray into digital-only marketing, Coca-Cola introduced its integrative “Share a Coke” campaign. Bottles of Coke products bearing people’s first names on the label served as the centerpiece of this campaign. Personalizing your message is already an effective way to connect with customers, but Coke solidified the connection with heartwarming television advertising depicting a diverse range of people sharing personalized bottles with friends and loved ones in emotional situations.

These traditional techniques were effective at attracting people’s attention and creating a demand for these personalized bottles. Customers didn’t want just any random name on their Coke bottles; they wanted their own names as well as those of their friends, families, crushes, etc. Coke then directed customers to visit its website to purchase bottles featuring the names they wanted. The campaign was wildly successful, with the “ShareACoke” hashtag featuring in 235,000 tweets and Twitter impressions reaching nearly 1 billion.

Why Is an Integrative Marketing Approach Effective?

Cross-channel advertising created by a digital content writer involving both traditional and digital approaches is effective for a number of reasons:

1. Human Psychology

In a fascinating article for Search Engine Watch, Howard Jacobson explains why watching ads on both television and YouTube results in twice the brand recall. The whole article is well worth a read, but here is an outline of the factors he describes:

Essentially, Jacobson argues that viewing ads on multiple channels helps us to remember by forming meaningful and recognizable patterns. Additionally, seeing your advertisements everywhere may give your audience the impression that your company is a bigger deal than it really is.

2. Relative Permanence

Digital content and advertising can be ephemeral. Despite your best efforts, your content can sometimes get lost in the shifting sands of the internet. While television and radio ads can be similarly transient, print ads have more staying power. This can make it easier for your audience to revisit those ads as needed if seeking more information later.

3. Less Intrusiveness

Sometimes the way to get someone’s attention is not to actively try to attract it. Here again, print media can have an advantage because it is viewed as a less obtrusive form of marketing. Using traditional methods to play “hard to get” can provoke interest in your ad. Customers may start seeking more information, which is when SEO article writing can work in your favor.

4. Active Encouragement

Once your combined traditional marketing and SEO efforts have attracted customers to your site, digital marketing in the form of interactive web design encourages immediate action. An SEO article can include a link at the end that the user can click immediately to accomplish one or more of the following:

• Place an order
• Schedule an appointment
• Get directions
• Call for more information

Your traditional ads may include a call to action that uses language encouraging your audience to take the next step but do not provide any mechanism by which to do so. Therefore, using a digital or web content writer to create specific landing pages can be the guiding light that brings your customers further down into the funnel.

What Role Does a Digital Content Writer Have To Play in an Integrative Marketing Strategy?

To answer this question, let’s take another look at the marketing funnel:

While digital marketing can be a factor at all points in the funnel, it tends to be most effective at providing a bridge between the top and the bottom. Therefore, the role of the digital content writer is to create search engine optimized articles that offer meaningful and useful information about your goods and services with the goal of increasing desire and spurring the audience to action.

Research shows that the content marketing aspect of your digital marketing campaign sees better results the more often you post and the longer each article is. You can increase your web traffic by a factor of 3.5 by posting new content approximately once every two days compared to once every seven days. You are also more likely to see “strong results” from an article of 2,000 words or more, even though most blog posts range between 500 and 1,000 words, and 1,050 is the average.

If you try to create all that content by yourself, you may soon run into a problem. Quality content takes time to write. Composing a single blog post can take six hours or more. The average is 3.5 hours, which is still almost half of an eight-hour workday. Creating your own content for your blog can start to seem like a part-time job without the extra salary.

It can be tempting to sacrifice quality for quantity, but that’s a lazy shortcut that is likely to do you more harm than good. Not only is your lower-quality content unlikely to stand out from the daily digital deluge, but publishing subpar content just for the sake of getting your name out there is unlikely to improve trust in your company or spark desire for your goods and services. Creating content for marketing purposes is already the digital content writer’s part-time or full-time job. Therefore, he or she can devote not only the time but the resources to creating quality articles that reflect well on your business and help transform interest into desire and, hopefully, action.

What Are the Benefits of Hiring a Digital Content Writer?

When you hire a single freelance digital writer on a contract basis, you pay for only the content you order without having to pay costs associated with employment, such as salary, benefits, training, etc. You gain the flexibility of being able to order content when you need it and the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your task is in the hands of a qualified professional.

When you hire article writing services that work with teams of multiple digital content writers, you get all those benefits plus a few more. Having more writers on a project results in greater scalability. You should be able to order as much or as little content as you want at any given time and potentially get your order back more quickly. With a larger pool of writers at your disposal, you gain the benefit of all their collected experience.

“Collected experience” refers to writing knowledge and skills, obviously, but it also refers to a background in your own or related industries. Writers have diverse origins, and all their past education and professional history can benefit you. The result is sophisticated material that can speak directly to the unique pain points of your readers.

Article writing services such as BKA Content also offer a wide variety of different types of digital content. Peruse our shop to see what we our digital content writers have to offer your business.