We often see traditional marketing pitted against digital marketing as though marketers need to choose one or the other. Yet the most successful marketers know that the best results come from using both.
But what is the best way to integrate these channels?
While there are endless ways to combine traditional and digital marketing, we’re going to focus our efforts on how you can support your traditional ads with Facebook, which is arguably the most effective digital opportunity in an advertiser’s wheelhouse.
Below are four proven methods we have used to extend traditional marketing with the Facebook Ads platform.
Facebook owns a scary amount of data, especially in the United States. Marketers can target audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and custom data such as email addresses. For a full list of targeting, take a look at AdvertiseMint’s Facebook Ads guide.
The targeting available in Facebook blows traditional targeting out of the water. So before you spend thousands of dollars on billboards, use Facebook advertising data to test campaign messaging, imagery, and audiences. Reaching a large enough sample size on Facebook is cheap and it can provide insight to direct traditional media buys.
For example, your marketing team can run two separate campaign messages during different time periods to track engagement and performance. Then you can optimize your traditional marketing efforts around the winning message.
In another example, maybe you have your messaging in place but you’re not entirely sure where your target audience lives. With Facebook, you can run the campaign to an entire city, state, or country and then see which zip codes give you the most activity. Then you can buy media for those specific areas.
Traditional media buys can be slow to implement even after all the creative assets are ready. On the other hand, Facebook ads can be up and running in just a few short hours. If you need to launch a campaign quickly, start with Facebook ads and then roll out traditional.
This method can also build awareness and excitement for a full campaign launch. If this is your goal, then consider using teaser messaging or shorter clips of the full campaign video.
Traditional media can be expensive. If your budget can only afford a few weeks of traditional exposure, consider extending your campaign before and after by using Facebook ads. It’s a great way to reuse quality content such as video. Filling in the gaps with Facebook advertising helps keep your campaign top of mind and reaches a larger portion of your audience.
Not everyone listens to the radio, watches TV, or uses Facebook. Even people within the same targeted audience can have different media preferences. Some people do use radio, TV, and Facebook but they have different attention spans per media.
To adequately reach as many people in your target audience as possible, it’s important to use more than one type of media. With 1.28 billion active daily users, Facebook is an ideal media to increase campaign reach.
Unlike traditional media, Facebook provides accurate reach and frequency data. It can precisely tell an advertiser how many unique people saw an ad and how frequently people viewed an ad over the lifetime of a campaign.
These are just four proven ways to utilize Facebook advertising for traditional campaigns. With such a flexible advertising platform, marketers have the opportunity to use Facebook to fit just about any marketing objective. Take a look at our case studies to learn more about using both traditional and digital marketing to create successful campaigns.
If you have not used Facebook Ads before, or if your current campaigns need additional strategy, drop us a line and let’s get the conversation started. We would be happy to get your campaigns up and running.