Offline Campaigns and Online Marketing Go Hand in Hand
Take a tip from the Houston SEO experts at EWR Digital: when building and promoting offline campaigns, it’s important to remember that offline branding is strengthened by online support. This also applies in reverse! Offline marketing and online marketing absolutely go hand in hand. What does this mean? Let us break it down for you.
Offline Campaigns Can’t Stand on Their Own
According to PEW research, 87% of the US population uses the Internet – this translates to 277,436,130 individuals who use the Internet across the nation. With so many people online – and using social media, especially Facebook – it’s absolutely essential to have an online presence for your business to succeed in this day and age. If your business is offline only, we urge you to get on social media, work on your website, and make your online presence known. It’s the only way to compete with others in the market today.
As mentioned above, 87% of Americans are online, but that’s not the one and only way to reach people. This is where offline campaigns come in – but be aware that offline marketing isn’t just for customers who aren’t primarily online. It’s essential to participate in both. Reaching customers offline can be done in a variety of ways:
- Billboards and Signs – The average person views a billboard for about 4 seconds. Billboards are highly effective in increasing brand recognition.
- TV or Radio Ads – Often praised as the top advertising mediums, TV and radio ads connect with people who are already listening. Radio is also a very effective way of connecting local business with local customers.
- Telemarketing – This is not just limited to cold calling! It’s an effective way to increase business and support or encourage existing customers. Use it to help customers set appointments, make decisions, and more. Think outside the box.
- Snail Mail and Print Advertising – Yes, people still read their mail! Using an eye-catching design and intriguing language can snag a customer in seconds.
- Vehicle Wraps – Something that just about everyone sees on a daily basis is cars on the road. Stuck in traffic on 290? That may be a blessing in disguise if you use vehicle wraps to catch the attention of other drivers nearby.
- Conference Presentations – One of the best ways to connect with your customers and gauge the competition is to participate in a conference. It gives your business a face and humanizes it.
Why You Need Both Online and Offline
In today’s world, it’s important to give customers the ability to connect, engage, and learn more about your business online. Thus, connecting your offline campaign to your online presence is key to building and implementing a successful campaign. Only doing online marketing or only implementing offline marketing strategies will end up hurting your campaign and limiting your sales overall. Understand that connection is important and your customers are diverse. Here’s why using both is ideal:
Imagine this: you’re a hardware store having a big sale next week and you want to let your customers know. Your email subscribers get an update in their inbox, there are banners on your website, and your social media is updated to reflect the upcoming sale. However, your business is the only hardware store in a small town. Most of your customers don’t get online and thus, don’t know about your sale. You’re losing these people when you don’t market offline, too. And it should be noted that word of mouth is nine times more effective than online metrics – shares, retweets, etc. – in affecting offline conversations about your business.
Putting a Face to a Name
The first thing people do when they hear their friends talking about a movie, a restaurant, or a business – they go online and look it up. Seeing your business online validates it to the consumer and makes it easy to learn more about what you offer. Simply put, merging online and offline efforts puts a face to the name of your business. Without offline marketing, your business only exists on the web. You need to exist to people outside of their computer screen, too!
On the other side of the coin, offline marketing without significant online efforts is also a mistake. Customers like to be able to easily find more information about your business, and the #1 way they do that is by going online and searching for you. For example, say Jenny saw your commercial on TV and was intrigued. She gets online and searches for the wording you used in the commercial. However, she can’t find you – because your commercial doesn’t match your website. You’ve just lost a customer.
John sees a billboard for a pool repair company in his city on his way home from work. It just so happens that he has been thinking about getting his pool replastered lately. Though he doesn’t remember the billboard word for word, John goes home and types in what he does remember seeing into his browser. But you haven’t created any sort of landing page or connection to the billboard, so John doesn’t find what he’s looking for. That disconnect is exactly why you need to have an online connection to your offline campaigns.
Imagine you used the same wording on your billboard as you did on your website. Voila! John was able to find you easily and get the information he was looking for – you now have a new client.
How to Do It Right
The single biggest thing online marketing has that offline marketing doesn’t is the ability to track and analyze data. Connecting your offline campaigns to an online presence, then, solves that problem.
The best way to see how your offline marketing efforts are doing – or whether they’re working at all – is to set up specific landing pages for your offline marketing campaigns. These custom landing pages will allow you to focus on a certain aspect of your business.
Customers should be able to find and identify your business easily and quickly. Trying to use new wording will only frustrate your customer when they try to search for you and can’t find you on the internet. Use the same keywords you used in your offline marketing – the same wording, the same phrases – to tell the customer they’re at the right place. Optimize your website, landing pages, videos, and any other content so that a customer who sees your advertisement offline can easily find you online.
Contact EWR Digital to Get Better Results for Your Business Today!
EWR Digital is the #1 Houston SEO expert and has been a leader in the industry for nearly 20 years. If you are looking for better marketing, more leads, and increased sales, what are you waiting for? Get the results you want and contact us today! Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing – the most downloaded SEO podcast on iTunes.
Why Offline Campaigns Need Online Support | EWR Digital – Houston, TX