Something Old, Something New - Tips on Integrating Traditional and Social Media Marketing November 23, 2009
Integrating Social Media Marketing with Traditional Marketing
A major issue that is challenging businesses today is how to integrate social media marketing into a traditional marketing plan. There are a lot of different models for doing this but social media marketing is still young enough that it’s difficult to tell which of these models will work best for a business. A lot of companies are finding it tough to devote enough time and attention to both traditional marketing and Internet marketing without going over budget or overextending themselves in other ways.
The main thing that you can to do make sure that you don’t run into this problem is to sit down and put some serious thought into your marketing campaign. By plotting it all out on paper, you’ll be able to come up with a good working idea of what type and amount of marketing will be most successful for you. Nearly all businesses find that they need to use both online and print marketing these days so it’s a matter of figuring out how these two things will differ from one another and complement each other.
One approach that a lot of businesses will take is to invest money into traditional marketing in order to initially push an item out into the public eye and then to follow that up with intense online marketing to generate buzz around the topic. For example, if you’re launching a new clothing line then you might do a commercial or magazine ad to introduce the line to potential new consumers. You would follow this up with online marketing which promotes the print ad and generates social media conversations about the product.
The thing to avoid is being redundant with your marketing because it’s a waste of your budget to do so. You want your traditional marketing to be a smart investment that advertises your product. You want your social media marketing to create a place for conversation about that product. This may all be done by a single marketing team or it may be handled by two different teams (a traditional marketing team and an internet marketing team) depending on the size of your business and budget. Make it work on paper and it will have a solid chance of working in real life.
