Leveraging the power of hybrid marketing is an important skill to learn. When done right it will save you money, enable you to learn a great deal about your customers, and make future advertising campaigns far more effective.
What is hybrid marketing?
If you look up the term hybrid marketing, you will find several definitions. For the purposes of this article, we are talking about advertising campaigns that you run online and offline. Often, in tandem.
What type of business can benefit from hybrid marketing?
Any kind of business can benefit from running hybrid marketing campaigns. Surprisingly, you do not necessarily need a website to be able to get started with it.
Online banner ads for physical business owners
Take for example banner ads. If you run a physical store, but do not yet have an e-commerce store, you can still benefit from using banner ads.
These can be placed on websites, which have the type of visitors that are likely to be interested in buying your products or services. If you want to you can simply share your phone number in these ads.
Although, it is usually better if you also embed a link into a banner ad that will take people to a sales page or social media page. They are incredibly easy to set up and maintain, so it really does not make sense not to have one or the other, even if you do not want a full-blown website. Use this banner ad guide to find out more and to learn how to quickly and easily create compelling ads.
Using digital signage for hybrid marketing
Most physical retailers, food outlets, gyms, salons, and clinics now use digital signage. Even small business owners are now doing it. A lot of them first bought a digital display screen to help them to remind customers of CoVid related safety measures and restrictions. Now, those screens are available to be used in the business for advertising. As a result, digital signage marketing is becoming more widely used. Being able to create your own promotional images and deploy them in-store in under half an hour puts the business owner squarely in control.
There is no need to wait for the printer to produce posters or banners. The store or food outlet owner can produce an advertisement and start using it immediately. Importantly, it is also extremely easy for them to measure how effective each ad is. They can use indoor LED video walls for advertising in their store and compare the sales data for promotional items with the timings of their digital display ads.
When they find something that works, it is easy to take those images and videos, resize them and use them online. Usually, that will result in an uplift in e-commerce sales.
Leveraging social media offline as well as online
It can be done the other way around too. Tweets and social media posts that create interest can be displayed in-store on your digital screens to create buzz and redirect customers’ attention to popular products.
You can also use physical marketing tools to further boost those same posts. For example, using your digital display screens to offer a 5% discount to those customers that have shared or commented on a specific tweet or post. You could also use this method to encourage people to share photos of products and in-store displays. This article, how to do this and explains dozens of other ways you can leverage social media offline.
Survey your customers online and offline
Most people do not mind answering one or two questions. Provided you are polite and do not ask them anything too personal they will normally answer short surveys. These can be done both on and offline, enabling you to identify any difference between the two groups. Armed with this information you can tweak what you have to offer accordingly.
Once the survey is complete, you can share the findings on your website and social media. As well, as in-store. Sometimes when you publish the results of a survey you will get powerful backlinks for your website. So, conducting surveys and using them to inform your marketing brings many benefits.
Ask for testimonials
People trust other consumers more than they do anyone else. According to Wyzowl, 95% of people say that reviews and what other buyers say about a product or service influences their purchasing decision. So, making it easy for people to leave reviews and testimonials in-store and online is important. Once you have got them, share the results in your offline advertising as well as on your website and social media feeds.
None of the above ideas are difficult for a business owner to implement. But it does make sense to hire someone who has plenty of experience to set your first hybrid marketing campaigns up alongside you. Doing so will provide you with even more ideas while teaching you how to do it efficiently.
