What’s better, print or digital?

You need to merge your print and digital marketing together

As we dive deeper and deeper into digital marketing, many dealers make the mistake of turning completely away from traditional marketing, as if one is in opposition to the other.

In fact, this is completely wrong. Traditional marketing has a huge place in your marketing budget, but it’s important that your traditional marketing be in the right place in your overall budget and is also directly tied to your digital investments.

When we compare the two marketing forms, digital marketing is much more trackable than traditional marketing efforts. With digital marketing, we can understand where customers are going online, how they are getting there, and what triggers are directing them through certain online journeys.

This trackability allows us to read reports to the Nth degree and more closely pinpoint a direct ROI. Conversely, traditional marketing has historically been a more difficult investment to track. We know that traditional marketing provides great reach and frequency with our presence and message and we still need to use those benefits in our broader marketing strategy.

When putting a marketing budget together, what it really comes down to is ROI. What I recommend is placing your marketing bets on the sure bets first, followed by the possible or uncertain bets later.

For those reasons, we prefer to focus a little more digitally than traditionally when it comes to marketing. But one of the best practices that every dealer needs to be focusing on when it comes to marketing — aside from needing both digital and traditional methods in a comprehensive strategy — is that dealers always need to tie their traditional marketing efforts to their digital ones.

What do I mean by this? What I don’t mean is using the same TV commercials you’ve had for the last 10 years and adding a URL to the bottom. That is insufficient. I’m talking about a complete integration of the two.

When someone is sitting on their couch watching TV and they see your commercial, they don’t leave their favorite show to come to your store, at least not as often as we’d like them to. They might call, but even still, not as often as we’d like. They don’t want to interrupt the program they already have in session.

Instead, they open their laptop or power up their iPad and go to your website. This is the most convenient for them and has the lowest barriers of entry. By integrating the TV commercial with our digital marketing, we can create a unified campaign for the customer and a seamless user experience between the two forms of media with which they are familiar. Website traffic helps supplement your traditional TV commercials on the customers’ terms.

Remember: traditional marketing isn’t bad. Generally, though, it comes with a high barrier of entry for the customer compared to the much lower barrier of entry to intercept someone in the virtual world. Use all of your traditional media in creative ways to drive people to your digital media where you can engage with your users and connect with them.

Digital media isn’t better than traditional media or vice versa. The real impact comes when you can effectively tie the two together and drive more traffic to your store, which leads to more conversion, and a stronger overall marketing investment.

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