Traditional marketing might be still considered the most effective use of marketing spend in terms of ROI due to the human element involved and the depth of knowledge that already exists for launching a traditional campaign compared with launching a digital one. Combining digital and traditional marketing methods can make for an essential 1-2 punch for campaigns. Here are 3 ways to integrate traditional and digital marketing to create a campaign so good nobody can ignore it.

Tactically speaking, traditional marketing still relies heavily on instincts in terms of what message to send and where to send it. For building a marketing campaign for traditional media you’ll need a large data set to understand what the sticking points are for your customers, as well as the best message to send to them. The problem almost always is with traditional marketing is that you only get one shot to make it count. You can’t tweak a campaign halfway, and all the lessons from the campaign will be learned after the fact.

Digital marketing allows for rapid cycling through campaign and experimenting. A technique that I’ve seen work really well for some digital marketing agencies is a technique called “feinting”, or selecting only a very small subsection of people to see your campaign, measuring the click-through of that very specific sub-group, then changing the campaign accordingly. This works particularly well in the cases of advertising through Google Adwords or Remarketing, where existing customers may be able to see your draft campaign, giving valuable insights before going in for the big campaign push. Feinting lets you build, measure and learn, without costing too much money.

One of the best ways to integrate digital marketing with traditional is to launch a traditional campaign where your digital is most concentrated. A great example of this is ING Direct, who built a large scale digital campaign around their primary customer base (CBD office workers), and launched a traditional marketing campaign for CBD billboards, reinforcing the message in combination with their already extensive social media and Adwords. The ROI on this 1-2 punch combination was widespread. Of course, the same result can occur vice versa, with a digital marketing campaign built around a traditional campaign lead, but this is much harder due to geolocation factors for a traditional marketing campaign often making it hard to pinpoint where the best digital marketing campaign could be launched.

If your customer base is shrinking due to competition, and you need to rekindle the customer fire with a campaign, the best way to do that is to do a “double attack”. If you can launch both a digital and traditional campaign at the same time, you can be guaranteed of hitting the most targets at once. It’s a shotgun approach and it can at times be hard to pull off, but by covering all bases at once with a well timed digital and traditional marketing campaign can yield significantly more market penetration with imprints.

Armed with digital and traditional methods for your campaign, you can build a campaign that can really launch your brand to the stratosphere. Feinting and changing your campaign to learn exactly what the right message is, launching simultaneous campaigns and building traditionally where your digital eyeballs are can really push your brand to the next level.