Phygital Marketing in the Industrial Sector: Optimizing ROI by Blending Physical and Digital Strategies

Once upon a time, marketing leaders in the industrial sector relied solely on personal interactions, printed materials, and physical marketing channels to promote products and build brand awareness. Trade shows and exhibitions provided opportunities to demonstrate machinery and technology. They also offered a chance to network with potential customers and partners. Marketers sent brochures, product catalogs, flyers, and promotional materials directly to prospects and customers via snail mail. They invested in print advertising through magazines, newspapers, industry journals, and catalogs. Sales representatives traveled extensively, visiting potential clients, providing product demonstrations, and negotiating deals. For decades, these traditional methods were effective. Yet, they lacked the targeted reach, measurability, and scalability that digital marketing offers today. 

The rise of smartphones, Internet searches, and social media blurred the boundaries between physical and digital experiences. Savvy marketing experts began recognizing the importance of creating cohesive campaigns that leveraged both. Now, marketers can seamlessly integrate online and offline touchpoints to enhance the overall customer experience. This fusion of physical and digital elements in marketing campaigns gave rise to "phygital marketing."

The Definition of Phygital Marketing

Phygital marketing, a blend of physical and digital marketing strategies, can revolutionize how businesses in the industrial sector optimize ROI. This approach acknowledges the significance of traditional in-person marketing strategies, like trade shows and in-person demonstrations, and takes advantage of the efficiencies and reach of digital marketing strategies, like email and social media. The primary objective of phygital marketing is to leverage both physical and digital channels synergistically, culminating in a highly effective and holistic marketing approach.

Physical Marketing in the Industrial Sector

If you’re a marketer in the industrial sector, you probably use trade shows, networking events, and in-person marketing tactics. For many companies, these face-to-face interactions and relationship-building opportunities are still crucial for conversion. They enable you to demo your products and technologies in a physical environment. This can be particularly important when the tangible aspects of your product are a significant selling point. 

Your products may need hands-on demonstrations to effectively showcase their features, functionality, and performance. Physical marketing allows your customers to interact directly with your products. It provides a tactile experience that digital channels can’t replicate. In-person marketing lets you show product capabilities and highlight unique selling points. It helps educate prospects on proper usage, leading to increased understanding and satisfaction.

Physical marketing also allows for face-to-face interaction, which promotes trust-building with potential customers. Personal interactions provide opportunities to address questions, reduce concerns, and establish rapport. This can be crucial in B2B and high-involvement purchase scenarios. Physical marketing activities foster relationship-building. They can also strengthen partnerships and identify new opportunities. Plus, they help you stay connected with key stakeholders. 

The Phygital Approach: A Winning Strategy for Marketing Leaders

While physical marketing is still essential, don't overlook the power of digital marketing. Digital marketing strategies can complement your traditional marketing efforts by amplifying your reach. They can also drive offline traffic to online marketing channels to enhance customer engagement. 

Digital marketing channels such as email, search engines, and social media reach a wider audience beyond the limitations of traditional methods. By leveraging targeted digital advertising and content marketing strategies, you can amplify the reach of your conventional marketing campaigns and connect with audiences across different demographics and geographic locations. You can also use lead generation tactics, like digital lead magnets, to capture information from potential leads you aren’t able to engage with in person.

Start by enhancing and accelerating your traditional in-person marketing strategies by driving customers and leads online. For example, QR codes on printed event materials can direct prospects to your website or social media profiles. They can provide more product information or help them schedule an in-person demo. You can also use email or social media for pre-event and post-event engagement. This helps build anticipation before the event and maintain connections after. 

Digital marketing also fosters audience engagement through interactive content, polls, surveys, and multimedia experiences. Creating compelling digital assets, such as videos, infographics, or interactive websites, can captivate and keep your audience's attention and reinforce messaging conveyed through traditional marketing tactics. 

This is the phygital approach. The phygital approach allows you to extend marketing reach and engage with audiences in a more meaningful way. It also helps you create a more effective and comprehensive marketing strategy.

Digital marketing can be an investment. For marketing leaders in the industrial sector that have historically relied on traditional methods, embracing digital marketing represents a strategic shift in budget and skills. However, one advantage of digital marketing is its ability to be measured and analyzed for ROI. Integrating both physical and digital tactics can create a more successful marketing strategy rooted in data.  

Measuring Success in Phygital Marketing

Phygital marketing enables conversion attribution and ROI tracking across physical and digital channels. Marketers can measure the impact of each touchpoint on the customer journey through the channels and tactics used to engage customers, such as Google Analytics, email open and click-thru rates, video views, and event attendance. These metrics determine the contribution of each marketing effort to ROI. Clear visibility into campaign performance allows you to strategically optimize your marketing spend by allocating resources.

To measure the success of your phygital marketing efforts, identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for both physical and digital channels. KPIs are quantitative metrics that assess the effectiveness of each marketing channel, strategy, or campaign. You can also track progress toward achieving specific goals. KPIs include metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs. They also include engagement and awareness metrics. Regularly monitoring KPIs allows you to identify areas of improvement, spot trends, and make data-driven optimization decisions. 

Digital marketing provides robust analytics and tracking tools that measure KPIs in real time. Many tools, such as Google Analytics and conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools like Optimizely, VWO, or Google Optimize, offer conversion tracking capabilities. They track specific actions that indicate a particular strategic outcome, such as website form submissions or demo sign-ups. Other tools, like HubSpot, provide revenue attribution models. These models credit revenue to different marketing touchpoints along the customer journey. Some tools allow tracking costs associated with marketing campaigns,  including advertising spend, agency fees, and staff time. 

Many analytics tools create custom dashboards tailored to specific business goals and KPIs. By aggregating data from multiple sources and visualizing it in a dashboard, you can track key metrics related to marketing ROI by channel, campaign performance, customer acquisition costs, and more.

Investing in digital marketing is a strategic move that can future-proof your business. It can protect you against market disruptions, technological advancements, and shifts in consumer preferences. Building a strong online presence enhances your traditional marketing strategies, positions your business for long-term success, and keeps you competitive in today’s digital-driven marketplace.

Case Study: Implementing Phygital Marketing at a Manufacturing Company

To implement a successful phygital marketing strategy, SyncShow suggests that marketing leaders consider integrating digital tools to complement their in-person efforts. Here’s an example of how our team does this for our clients. 

Our client, SkyLift, a manufacturer of backyard easement machines, was attending a trade show and needed both physical and digital marketing support to build brand awareness and drive lead generation for a new machine, the MD 6000R. 

We developed event banners, new sell sheets, a dedicated webpage for the new machine, and engaging social media posts to amplify the announcement and enhance brand visibility.

After the event, Skylift experienced a 2.14% increase in lead conversion on its website compared to the previous period. Additionally, user engagement saw significant boosts, with a 14.6% rise in users, a 14.8% increase in new users, and an 8.4% uptick in overall engagement compared to the previous period.

By incorporating digital elements into the traditional trade show environment, Skylift engaged more potential customers both at the event and afterward, maximizing their investment and increasing their ROI.

Get Phygital Today

As a digital marketing agency, we don’t recommend ignoring the traditional marketing strategies that still work for your business. Instead, we recommend leveraging both physical and digital marketing tactics to achieve the best of both worlds. Phygital marketing is a powerful opportunity for marketing leaders to enhance physical marketing efforts with digital strategy. By integrating these two approaches, you can create a more effective and comprehensive marketing strategy that will extend your reach and engage your audience more meaningfully, leading to a higher return on investment. 

Let’s discuss how SyncShow can help you leverage the best parts of both digital and physical marketing to create the most impactful marketing strategy for your business. Schedule a discovery call today.