Time for Marketers to Bridge the Great Divide  

Many South African marketers are still tempted to treat digital and traditional marketing as separate disciplines. The thinking is that traditional, offline media is the mass marketing channel while digital media reaches only a small, rich segment of the population.

But what many marketers are discovering is that digital media has a reach and breadth among their addressable markets that is often surprising, even in a country with South Africa's relatively low penetration of broadband connectivity.

They're realising that they should no longer be treating it as an add-on to traditional marketing, but rather as an integral and integrated part of their marketing strategies.
Quite often, online and offline marketing can work together in ways that are surprising if they're blended together in an integrated strategy. And marketers that start off considering the role that digital has to play in the marketing mix can often use it to drive better results from their investments into traditional media. The ideal place to start is with clearly defined objectives across the multiple channels you will use to reach customers and prospects.

Measurement matters
One reason that digital should be taking an increasingly central role in your campaigns is because it is so measureable. By now, most marketers understand that they can track their online campaigns' performance with a great deal of accuracy.
They can easily determine how many people saw an online ad, for example, and how many of them clicked on the ad for more information or visited their website. They can trace customers from clickthrough to conversion, getting a window into the campaign's return on investment.

But the measurability and track-ability of online media can also provide a number of useful metrics for measurement of the performance of offline campaigns. For example, data that you collect about visits to your website, customer engagements on your website and relevant web searches for your products can give you valuable insight into whether your audience responded to your television or print ads the way you had hoped.
This marks a shift for marketers, who in the past had to rely on surveys, focus groups and other unwieldy research methodologies to gain insight into the performance of their campaigns. This data was usually best-guess information that could only be collected and collated after a campaign had already run its course.

A test bed for marketing
The measurability and immediacy of online also makes it a perfect medium for testing and optimising marketing strategies before investing in massive offline campaigns. One of the major benefits of online is that it makes it easy to listen to your customers.
You can start listening before you even start to roll out a new campaign.
For example, you can track what customers are saying about your brands and your competitors in social media channels. And, of course, you have access to your historical online campaign data to inform your decision-making.
It's also simple to test different creative messaging, placements, and offers to see which get the best responses from your audience.
You can compare, change and optimise on the fly at relatively low risk and cost, compared to the inflexibility of broadcast or print media.

Closing words
When you align your online and offline marketing strategies, you can usually achieve a return on investment that goes far beyond the sum of their parts.
Consistent messages across channels can reinforce each other, since most customers today are omnivores that consume information across fragmented print, online, mobile and broadcast outlets.

And if an integrated approach is taken to online and offline marketing, you can analyse which strategies, channels, and creative messages work best for you, and in which contexts. You can align all of your marketing behind your business objectives and understand how every element contributes towards achieving goals such as brand-building through customer conversion and retention.

Today's consumers live in a world of interconnected media, and so should marketers trying to reach them in an integrated manner.