February 21, 2005

Get more out of your budget with digital marketing

Integrating the Web and email into your company's marketing plans can pay off in many ways. It can help you reach more people with deeper and more targeted information, and it can help you get a higher return on investment from your company's marketing budget.

Let's take a look at one example to see how this might work.

A clothing manufacturer that sells primarily to mid-size businesses wants to increase sales outside its local territory. They need to get information about their products into the hands of their target market. Traditionally this goal could be accomplished by printing thousands of full color product catalogs and distributing them to the people who may be interested in buying the products.

The clothing company might also run newspaper ads or print ads in trade publications that reach their target market. The drawback here is the limited space in print advertising which prevents the company from showing more than a few of their products at a time. And, a newspaper or print ad is seen for a very short time, perhaps a day or a week in most cases.

Now, to integrate the digital world, the company could build a high quality online product catalog. The online catalog could contain far more product information than a paper catalog without the additional printing and distribution costs. The online catalog could be searchable and interactive. The cost of this online catalog would be less than a print catalog of similar quality.

Next the clothing company could run a 'lighter' more focused traditional marketing campaign which has the goal of pointing people to the online catalog. Instead of mailing out a complete full color paper catalog the company would send a well-designed direct mail piece at a fraction of the cost, which means the company could make contact with far more people for the same budget. The direct mail piece would point people to the online catalog for deeper product information.

In fact, the direct mail piece could be several different pieces, one for every subset of the target market, or perhaps one direct mail piece for each main product area. The clothing company could also run smaller newspaper ads, print ads, and even radio or TV ads, all pointing people to the online catalog.

Of course the company probably still needs a full color paper catalog. But with a focus on the online catalog it is very likely the company will have to print far fewer paper catalogs. This is especially true since more than 75 percent of people in Canada have Internet access, and that number is only growing.

The main point you should take away from this article is that you don't necessarily need to increase your company's marketing budget, but you do need to shift more of that budget to your company's website and email marketing. And in doing so you need to think about integrated marketing campaigns where the Web, email, and your traditional promotions are all working together to help you get more sales.

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