Using Digital Marketing to Superpower Traditional Media

Marketers working in traditional media are having to compete with digital metrics. The power of being able to trace views, engagement and even ROI instantaneously is powerful for companies conducting forecasts and managing risk as well as marketers in their proposals.

Expectations have changed. Companies are often no longer happy to wait months to find out if a campaign has worked. With increased pressure on traditional marketing budgets, digital marketing techniques can help traditional marketers hone in on specifying the ROI they know is there.

With a subset of the budget, ads can be tested on digital ad platforms to find:

a) General engagement with each of the ad variants

b) Engagement within specific demographics (Age, Interests, Gender, etc)

These metrics can then be used to predict how well an ad is likely to perform in traditional media be that TV, radio, newspapers, brochures and even website copy and sales decks.

At telointerview.com, a start-up I worked for, we increased ‘Time on Page’ through using our Google Ads data to dictate our marketing using a data-driven approach. We changed our landing page copy on the website and the text within our sales decks to use the terminology most engaged with in Adwords.

Validating Website & Print Media Copy with Google Ads

Below is a table of TeloInterview’s click through rates using different search terms. This data can help guide how we should be talking about the product in more traditional media such as brochures or print ads as well as in sales tools such as sales decks and calls.

From the table above taken from Google Adwords, it looks like ‘video interview software’ is resonating more than the other terms with it’s Click Through Rate of 4.51%. It looks like TeloInterview should be using that term in it’s media rather than the other terms.

Television Ads with YouTube Ads

30 second television commercials cost, on average, over $100,000 to produce. Thus without even accounting for the money spent on the airtime, airing an ad that converts viewers into customers is critically important. However, as A/B testers on the web have found, what converts is often not what you think and our intuition gets it wrong. All the time.

A great way we can test lots of variants and edits of video ads in a cost effective manner is to use Youtube Advertising. Youtube Ads can be run for less than $10 a day and you can start getting data mid-production process and pre-meeting with the client for your final deliverable.

Youtube ads can cost around $0.2 per view. So with a budget of only $1000, you can receive 5000 impressions from demographics of your choice. Using that data you can pick the best variant or edit to use later in television or other video based marketing. (Including explainer videos on websites).

Radio with Spotify

On Spotify, serving a 30 second audio ad also costs around $0.2 and so Spotify also provides a fantastic way to cheaply, quickly and easily check how your radio / audio-based ad will perform.

Asking questions like: Should we use Jenny or Tom’s voice? Or, was that a good joke to crack? Can now be answered. Just ask the data. Look at the click through rate on the ad for each of the variants to see what converts listeners into customers.

Considerations and Questions to Ask Yourself

Watch your demographics!

Are the ads being viewed by similar audiences to those who might view the ads on other mediums?

How do I go digital, what are the steps?

Start with what traditional media you would like to advertise in. Create your ad variants and start testing them depending on what type of ad it is. TV Ad? Try Youtube Ads. Newspaper/Text Ad? Try Google Ads/Adwords. Radio Ad? Try Spotify. Then look at the engagement metrics to bring data into your proposals and to work out which ad to invest in when buying ads in traditional media.