DUKKY

Editor’s Note: Today’s post was written by Mark Hasland and originally appeared on the Overnight Prints blog.  It is reprinted here with permission.

Despite the growing divide between social media and other forms of marketing, several of the top marketing firms are still finding uses for direct marketing campaigns. With the economic downturn hitting small businesses the hardest, it’s important for small business owners to integrate their different marketing platforms, and also make sure that their campaigns are engaging their consumers.

Business consultants maintain that distributing your marketing budget equally over all of your platforms is the best way to approach a campaign. As the popularity of social media marketing skyrockets, many firms get caught up favoring one form of marketing over the other. That could be a potential downfall, Gyro HSR Chief Operating Officer Richard Perry told Marketing Magazine. With the introduction of social media marketing, many businesses are forgetting to integrate both of their marketing arms into one campaign.

“A lot don’t integrate their marketing. The marketing departments are still organized how they were five years ago,” Perry says. “It is time for brands to reorganize internally.”

The key is to make sure that a small business owner’s marketing campaign is not only relevant to their intended audience, but that it actively engages them, says Mike Welsh, chief executive of Publicis Dialog. Social media relies heavily on the “participation nation,” as Welsh calls social media-ites, but tuned-out tweeters could be completely missing the message.

“Engage has become a buzzword, with direct and sales promotion agency bosses using it liberally,” Welsh told Marketing Magazine. “This could be dismissed as new business-seeking jargon, but, in fairness, it usefully describes the requirement for marketing messages to be a relevant and useful part of consumers’ lives.”

The takeaway here for a savvy small business owner is that a direct mail marketing campaign should be used to enhance a social media campaign, and vice versa. Small business owners can do this by reaching out to potential clients through direct mail marketing, but also including calls to action that reinforce their social media campaign.

For example, a promotional brochure could encourage prospects to follow them on Twitter, or become a fan of their product on Facebook. Likewise, social media should be leveraged in a way that would spur potential clients to request additional product information.

At Dukky,  we’ve also seen that adding social sharing options to direct mail campaigns consistently results in dramatically improved response rates.