How to Incorporate Marketing Principles Into Your Digital Strategy

Today, many companies jump right into creating their own websites and social media accounts as their first marketing platforms. However, a basic understanding of traditional marketing principles is beneficial for these digital platforms to be used to their full potential. Here are several marketing concepts to integrate into your digital marketing strategy.

Marketing Basics

Marketing basics are the principles that old-school marketers are familiar with. Traditional marketing basics include principles of branding, segmentation, the sales funnel, and customer experience. Successful marketing materials such as television ads, direct mail marketing tools, and billboards often follow these concepts to engage their target audiences. Understanding marketing basics can make ad campaigns more successful. For example, a busy parent is more likely to use a promotional brochure received through the mail than to click on an ad banner on a website. A driver is more likely to remember a billboard on the way home than the name of the product that just showed up online less than a minute ago. However, compared with digital marketing, traditional marketing materials are often more expensive and more time-consuming to produce. So how can the advantages of traditional marketing principles be incorporated into your digital strategy?

A New Way to Think About Competition

In SEO, your competition is no longer the shop across the street that sells the same thing. It may be a totally unrelated business in a totally unrelated market, but that competition is outranking you on the keywords in a search engine. This is when understanding how to brand your products will help you tremendously. Proper branding of your business will improve its reputation against your competitors, improve social media engagement, and increase the number of natural backlinks. You want customers to be able to recognize your products and associate them with your company.

Effective Ways to Use Market Segmentation

Market segmentation in the digital age has become much easier due to the actual metrics that are available with social media analytics tools. Market segmentation refers to separating your audience into quantifiable groups based on demographic information such as location, gender, and age. By using market segmentation information, you might find out that the most popular social media for millennials is Facebook, but that younger generations prefer Instagram, or that over 80% of Pinterest users are females.

The Sales Funnel and Targeted Customer Experience

The sales funnel is a traditional marketing principle that is passed down to digital marketing. A sales funnel is a cone-shaped representation of consumer traffic. While many people may pass through your website, they need to be directed through your website in a controlled, personalized manner. A person who wandered onto your website to browse can be filtered through the different elements of your site and emerge as a customer. Segmentation is a way to direct customer experience to build rapport and develop a relationship. This is one of the most effective traditional marketing basics that can be effectively used in digital marketing.

Even though traditional and digital marketing can seem worlds apart, integrating the two strategies can offer many benefits to give your business an edge.

Marketing goes nowhere without a phenomenal public appearance.