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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

360 marketing

Traditional and digital marketing both have unique strengths that can be used throughout the buyer’s journey to achieve your broader marketing goals. By thinking this way, you can understand the importance of aligning with other marketing departments, beyond the digital marketing team. Working in collaboration is key to moving your potential customers through the funnel and converting.

Using the full circle of marketing tactics is called a 360 or integrated marketing strategy, as it aims to engage consumers at all touchpoints throughout their day. The mainstream definition of a 360 marketing strategy is that it is a marketing plan that is both online and offline, across all digital channels, on social media, and anywhere that your customer spends time.

It's a holistic promotion that truly covers all touchpoints. In short, to be truly 360, a campaign would need to include everything that is used by your consumer – mobile, digital, search, and social, as well as any relevant traditional channels like TV, radio, or print.

If your audience is digital native, you may not have an offline or traditional media element. But if you do, let’s take a look at the benefits of a 360 marketing campaign that implements both traditional and digital marketing.

Benefits of a 360 marketing campaign

We have briefly touched on a few advantages of a 360 marketing campaign already, but let’s list some precise benefits of an integrated 360 marketing campaign.

Covers entire buying cycle

First of all, it covers the entire buying cycle. Each media channel, offline or online, is good at achieving specific marketing objectives. When channels are used together, they can cover the full spectrum of the consumer’s journey to help efficiently move them through the funnel towards purchase, conversion, and retention.

Uses every point of contact

An integrated 360 campaign taps into each audience’s point of contact with your brand. In today’s media landscape, your audience is not attached to one particular type of media. They will travel across digital, television, print, and other media. Being present across the most impactful and important touchpoints allows your brand to resonate and move with your potential customers as they go through their day. Integrated marketing campaigns allow you to adapt to media consumption changes such as seasonality and daily trends.

Optimizes for scale and relevance

An integrated 360 campaign optimizes for scale and relevance. Traditional media types are good for scaling as they reach a large number of people in a short amount of time. Just be aware of the cost and time it takes to create and produce ads and assets to run on traditional channels. Digital media channels are good for relevance and attracting specific consumers, with lower costs for production and shorter lead times to create the assets. A 360 campaign can help attract the ideal consumers who are most likely to convert while helping your brand get discovered by potential new customer prospects.

Implements both traditional and digital marketing

360 marketing campaigns provide a complete marketing experience to the audience. For the audience, having a full brand experience is a bonus. If they have already experienced the brand online, they might want to experience it offline through the store experience or see the brand in the street or on TV when they don’t expect it. That, for brands, is a great cyclical process; it creates familiarity with the audience, and aids recall. We should also consider the notion of dual screening. This is where marketers target an audience while they consume traditional mass media like TV while receiving targeted messages online, as is the case with trending Twitter hashtags during live TV or breaking news events.

Enables you to effectively measure results

Finally, an integrated 360 campaign enables you to measure results effectively. Traditional media choices are hard to report on in terms of ROI. Therefore, using digital strategies can help shed some light on how the audience actually interacts with and reacts to the campaign, and can also help measure the impact of traditional media. For instance, if a brand runs an ad on TV at 8pm, and the corresponding website analytics reports an upward trend at that time, we can draw some conclusions on the effectiveness of the ad based on the actions taken online. The difference between normal online activity and a traffic or sales spike around the time of a TV ad is a good measure of the impact of the TV ad.

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Please note that the module slides are designed to work in collaboration with the module transcript document. It is recommended that you use both resources simultaneously.

Digital Marketing Resources:

Philippe Polman

Philippe is a digital engagement specialist with extensive experience helping clients to create and manage deeper, more personal relationships with their target audiences. In previous roles, Philippe has designed and executed international communications programs focused on internal communications, UX, brand management, media engagement (traditional and digital), investor relations, and corporate positioning. More recently, he has founded his own aviation consultancy business, which combines both his passion and experience for the aerospace industry.

The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful. While relevant to this module, you will not be assessed on this content.

You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    Introduction to Digital Marketing
    Philippe Polman
    Skills Expert

    This module introduces the core principles and purpose of digital marketing. It will enable you to develop clear and actionable business objectives for a digital marketing plan, to gain audience and industry insight by conducting digital research, and to prepare the foundations for a fully integrated 360 digital marketing campaign by connecting effectively with your customers and target audience.