What is Phygital Marketing?

Why you need it and how to incorporate it into your marketing strategy

Historically, physical and digital marketing channels have lived separately, each excelling in their individual areas, but recently, brands have been converging these channels to form a more seamless experience for their customers. Phygital marketing combines the best aspects of physical and digital marketing into one, well-rounded experience. 

While digital technology keeps increasing its reach into the real world, consumers still value physical experiences. 

Listening to a band on the best headphones is great, but there is nothing like going to a concert and hearing them perform live.

In an effort to merge these two experiences, marketers are turning toward phygital solutions that will provide their customers with the familiarity of physical and the ease of digital.

Phygital marketing can incorporate digital strategies into physical environments, and it can also incorporate physical experiences into digital environments. Depending on your business type and objectives, phygital marketing can be utilized in many different ways.

No matter how you choose to incorporate phygital into your marketing strategy, establishing a measurement plan is essential to gain the most insights into your user’s journey as they interact with content through different channels and platforms.

Benefits of phygital marketing

There are many reasons why marketers are looking towards phygital marketing strategies. Improving the user/consumer experience is just one of them. Below are some other benefits you can attain with phygital campaigns:

• Measuring engagement: By working with a mobile measurement provider (MMP), you will be able to measure physical interactions to resulting in-app digital activity and analyze the impact of your marketing efforts. 

• Mitigate churn: Keep your customers coming back through phygital marketing techniques. By providing your customers with a unique experience that makes them feel valued, you will keep them coming back for more. 

• Enhances physical experiences with information: Provide more information about your product or service by overlaying your physical space with digital content. When customers walk into your store they can receive information about certain products via an app or webpage. Scannable quick response (QR) codes offer a great mechanism to digitally engage visitors in a physical context.

• More opportunities to sell products: If you are solely an eCommerce store, consider creating a pop-up experience to attract new customers who might not have interacted with your product in its original form.

• Provide a seamless experience: Phygital marketing helps businesses both recognize areas that need improvement and provide solutions to improve those areas so that the customer journey is seamless from start to finish.

• Produce personalized content: Overlapping marketing channels allows for a better understanding of your customers needs, habits, and patterns. This helps you predict future interactions and serve your customers with content or products that they actually want.

These are just a few of the many ways that phygital marketing can benefit your business. An MMP can help you identify how to best measure the impact of these experiences.

Examples of phygital marketing

Phygital marketing can be applied across different marketing channels in a variety of creative ways. Finding unique methods to market your products/services will capture your customers and encourage new audiences to engage with your brand. Here are a few examples:

Social Media
Social media provides a digital platform to buy products and services. Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms have incorporated eCommerce functionality into their apps which makes it easy for businesses to sell their products without the need of a physical storefront. Additionally, social media makes it easier to engage customers with special offers and discounts.

Pop-Up Stores
If you are looking to take your digital marketing into a physical space, consider creating pop-up stores that bring a physical experience to your customers. They can engage their senses by touching, smelling, hearing, or even tasting a product. Pop-ups allow your customers to actually try the product before buying it, adding a new dimension to their experience.

New Technology
New technology is being implemented into the digital space. Wearable devices that exchange information automatically or virtual reality experiences that take customers into a digital space is the epitome of phygital marketing: elevating the customer experience to provide a simpler and streamlined engagement with a brand.

Creating your phygital marketing strategy

Before you incorporate phygital techniques into your marketing strategy, consider taking the following steps:

1. 1. Work with an MMP – As mentioned above, an MMP will help you gather, measure, and analyze your data to provide you with a holistic view of your marketing efforts. Before you start running new marketing campaigns, it is important to utilize an MMP like Kochava so that you don’t miss out on valuable performance data and engagement insights.
   2. Understand your customers journey – It’s important to measure and analyze the customer journey as they move through your app, website, or physical space. What is the first thing they do and what do they do next? How many steps does it take before they make a purchase and what are those steps? Knowing what your customers do and where they do it will help you see gaps in their current experience. From there, you can find ways to improve those experiences through digital or physical marketing efforts.
   3. Figure out what your customers like/dislike – You can survey your customers to find out what they like and don’t like about the current experience. Is it lacking human interaction or is there too much going on within a physical space? Maybe your customers want more personalization in your store or less distraction online. Finding out what your customers want more and less allows you to solve those problems with phygital solutions.
   4. Utilize automation – For businesses who want to incorporate digital into their physical space consider taking advantage of automation and other digital technologies. For example, Amazon Go has created a physical space that allows customers to pay for their items without having to wait in line. As customers exit the store with their products, their Amazon app automatically charges them. This streamlines the user’s experience within the store while still providing them with all of the sensory experiences gained from a physical space.

Taking these steps will set you up for a successful campaign, but depending on your business, other steps might be needed. Above all, get organized and formulate an objective/goal to keep you on track.

Get started with Kochava

Kochava is a leading omni-channel measurement and attribution solution that provides marketers with valuable tools to optimize their marketing efforts. Here are a few ways in which Kochava can help you tackle phygital marketing.

• In-App Events – Kochava allows you to create and manage in-app events to understand the correlations between attribution source information and post-install behavior. Within the phygital space, you can map physical user activity to subsequent in-app interactions to see how your users move between channels.
• QR Codes – QR codes are a great way to connect content at physical locations to online, digital information. Kochava QR codes with SmartLinks™ will help you maximize customer engagement, getting your users to the content they are looking for faster. As soon as the user is in the app, you can tie any in-app activity back to the QR code that was scanned for an increased understanding of your app users.
• IdentityLink® – Connect the dots between all of your marketing channels to see a complete view of your customer’s journey with IdentityLink. Gain a holistic view of every device, platform and channel your users interact with to optimize your ad spend.

Physical spaces are merging even more with digital content to create an improved customer experience. Phygital marketing has many benefits. Knowing what areas within your current marketing strategy need improvement can be solved by introducing physical or digital solutions.

Kochava is here to help you identify the gaps in your marketing and provide you with advanced solutions to increase your customer base. Want to learn more? Visit kochava.com or contact us at support@kochava.com.