Mobile technology has been a game changer for marketers. The similarities between traditional and digital marketing strategies are there. Campaigns must be targeted, focused, measurable, simple, memorable and profitable - with great content. For Angela Hausman, “digital marketing is more effective if you remember the concepts that made traditional marketing successful.” (www.business2community.com).
Marketers want to communicate key messages to a target audience and, for many years, used traditional PR methods such as print (newspapers, magazines, newsletters, billboards), broadcast (television and radio), direct mail and telemarketing to achieve this aim. The advent of new media has changed the landscape. Traditional forms of print, broadcast and telephone advertising now work in tandem with digital media.
Traditional marketing is tried and tested. Digital marketing is relatively new and ever changing. It demands real time responses but also allows for better customer engagement. It provides a more personal experience for consumers and has a broad reach. Together, both traditional and digital marketing methodologies provide the greatest impact.
“Using a combination of traditional and digital marketing techniques is the most effective method of marketing, far more useful than using either on its own.” (Eleanor Palmer; www. enveritasgroup.com: March 2015)
Digital marketing strategies can incorporate an array of mobile and social platforms to encourage consumers to engage with a product or brand. As technology has advanced, the area of digital marketing has come to the fore, going beyond email and websites to new and ever changing methods– from mobile phone apps, to SMS messaging, search engine optimisation and across the social media platforms.
“Companies grappling with the issue of whether to market via the internet are already behind,” says Frank Ingari (www.strategybusiness.com).
“Companies attempting to build a coherent internet marketing strategy must begin to believe that the web is likely to be the centre of their marketing future, not simply an adjunct to traditional marketing methods.”
What we can learn from Guinness:
As a global market giant, the iconic global brand has been a world leader in utilising traditional marketing methods, from instantly recognisable posters, billboards, beer mats and print advertising, to an array of popular, branded products and award winning television commercials. Guinness has a multi-million euro budget and is a good example of how a large company can use both traditional and digital forms of marketing.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, posters created by SH Benson’s advertising agency included the phrases such as ‘Guinness for Strength', 'Lovely Day for a Guinness', 'My Goodness, My Guinness' and 'Guinness is Good for You', and they remain popular to this day, with artwork by John Gilroy.
Who can forget the ’94-’95 'anticipation' campaign featured actor Joe McKinney dancing to ‘Guaglione’ while waiting for his pint. The song went to no. one in the Irish charts for several weeks. In 2000, Guinness' multi award winning advertisement ‘Surfer’ was named the best television commercial of all time in a UK poll conducted by The Sunday Times and Channel 4.
Image courtesy of www.guinness.com
They have since embraced the digital age, with more than 6.5 million facebook fans (February 2018) and 52,000-plus twitter followers for Guinness Ireland. They have created mobile apps and continue to be at the forefront of advertising by incorporating both traditional and digital marketing strategies.
And it’s working. Their ‘Never Alone’ advertisement was viewed by 22 million people online. (www.marketingmagazine.co.uk)
Integration:
While they differ in terms of cost, response and measurement, any marketing strategy must be fully integrated across all platforms, both online and offline. Both traditional and digital marketing work best together. For a successful outcome, the principles of marketing are the same, requiring strong brand awareness, knowing your audience and providing a simple, key message across all media. “This will not only increase your campaigns impact but also ensure that you aren’t putting out contradictory messages that will confuse your audience,” (Jan Willis; www.searchenginepeople.com).
When compiling a marketing strategy for Guinness, Stephen O’Kelly, marketing director for Guinness in Europe, and his team looked firstly at the desired outcome, and secondly at different communication tools, both traditional and digital.
The initial brief is “channel neutral”, he says, looking instead at the desired outcome of the campaign. They may want to influence consumer behavior or instill an attitude change. “It’s about the best way to achieve that,” he says, “including what is the most powerful role that digital can play.”
One successful example where they incorporated both traditional and digital marketing strategies was their Sapeurs campaign in 2014, which told the story of the ‘society of elegant persons of the Congo'. Guinness created a 60 second and 30 second broadcast ad, accompanied by a five minute documentary on YouTube, which gained 1.7 million views on the social media channel. “It really transformed people’s connection with the story,” explains Stephen O’Kelly, “there is no way we would have been able to do that within a traditional broadcast media environment.”
Cost and budget:
Traditional marketing methods are expensive, yet they have proven to be successful over the years and hold a historical track record for many organisations. By comparison, digital marketing is relatively new and far more cost effective. A marketer can set up many social media platforms free of charge with immediate access to an audience of millions.
And yet, big brands spend big bucks on their digital marketing campaigns.
As one of the most successful brands in the world, Guinness is a big budget marketing operation, now run by parent company, Diageo. In 2015, Diageo’s marketing spending worldwide was $2.5 billion dollars for their range of products (www.statista.com). For example, their ‘tipping point’ campaign in 2007 was their most expensive at that point, with a budget of £10 million. For Shawn Porat, “unless you have a huge marketing budget, you are at a disadvantage compared to your larger and better known competitors,” (www.theglobeandmail.com; June 2015).
Response:
There is immediacy to digital marketing strategies. Consumers engage and interact in real time and expect quick responses. While more traditional forms of marketing typically involve months of planning and spreparation, digital marketing is all about implementation, requiring “fresh content on a daily basis” (Angela Hausman, www.business2community.com).
Traditional marketing is passive, according to Eleanor Palmer, while digital marketing engages consumers as they become “actively involved”, allowing them to “talk back right now” (Ingari). It allows marketers to have a more personal, one-on-one, relationship with their audience.
As Stephen O’Kelly describes, “when you see a new campaign from Guinness on TV, potentially we could have been working on that for up to six months with a lot of crafting and fine-tuning. With the emergence of digital and a more reactive approach to content, we have changed our approach, our pace and how we work, in order to maintain the same high bar that people expect from Guinness to deliver brilliant content on a real-time basis.” (as interviewed by Anna Richardson Taylor on www.cmo.com)
Through digital marketing strategies, organisations can provide a lot more information to the consumer than traditional marketing allows. Broadcast marketing is limited to a short and specific length of time, while print marketing is also constrained by space and impact. A simple message can be conveyed through traditional marketing, along with a ‘call-to-action’ - directing consumers to a website or social media page, where they can delve into more and more information as required.
“Digital has really changed the game for us,” explains Guinness’ Stephen O’Kelly, “it helps us reach wider audiences with the most relevant content. But it also facilitates much deeper story-telling in longer formats - something that was previously impossible due to the restrictions and cost of traditional broadcast media.”
Measurement and Analytics:
As digital marketing strategies evolve, they are focusing more and more on tools to measure, target and analyse audience engagement. This is crucial in order to establish a return on investment in the area of digital marketing. Since its inception, digital marketing has included ways to measure audience interaction and demographics, providing segmented data information, such as age and gender. This allows marketers to target their audience in a more precise way than traditional marketing methods. For Palmer, traditional media is “a highly effective way to reach a broad consumer base” but digital media is “a great way to reach out to a specific audience” and is “more measurable”.
The traditional method of broadcast advertising, for example, uses sampling techniques, such as Nielsen’s TAM ratings, to measure ratings and demographics. Nielsen’s can also identify commercial ratings to determine average viewership during commercials. For Stephen O’Kelly, this ‘tried and tested’ way of measuring and tracking traditional marketing is a major advantage over digital strategies.
As O’Kelly describes:
"A big factor for the digital industry in attracting investment from big brands or big business is to be able to demonstrate measurement and evaluation. TV and traditional media benefit from the fact that the measurement, tracking and analytics are really well established. If we are looking at investing in a new campaign, it’s very easy for me to prove ROI for more traditional media, but much harder for digital. Right now the digital spend within our media budget is around 20 percent reflecting this fact."
Yet for Ingari, this form of sampling is “expensive” and “of doubtful usefulness” in smaller sectors. Digital marketing strategies allow for real time analysis at your fingertips. For Ingari, “the internet already enables unprecedented learning in its ability to capture site navigation information, information retrieval and purchase behaviour.” He argues that the web “will soon pass broadcast and cable television as the medium with the broadest consistent reach”.
