While online marketing is critical, it is important not to forget the importance of offline marketing in your business, as well as the consideration of combining your online and offline efforts.
While we do want to continually ensure that our online presence is as good as possible. It would be foolish to assume that offline marketing is unnecessary.
That is quite the contrary, in fact.
Let’s Define Offline Marketing
There are a number of strategies that can be considered as offline marketing, basically anything that isn’t “online.” Offline strategies include:
- Direct mail or “snail mail”
- Cold-calling or cold outreach
- Newspaper advertising or magazine advertising
- Customer service calls to engage customers again
- Sandwich boards or signs
- Billboards
- Radio/TV
- And more…
While these may seem or even be considered old-school techniques, they can actually be rather effective when combined properly with your online marketing.
The Importance of Offline Marketing
All the marketing you do should always be integrated and convey one cohesive brand messaging and look. Offline marketing is no exception to that and should be in conjunction with whatever you are conveying online as well. One brand, one look, across all media.
For example, a billboard sign is considered offline marketing, but the look, messaging and overall branding should look similar to what someone may see in an online ad.
The most important thing to remember, however, is that there are some opportunities to reach audiences that may not see you online, (i.e. they aren’t searching for the keywords you are targeting, have not come across your social media yet, or aren’t online as often and still prefer reading in print).
The idea is that if you cast a wider net, your chances of being seen are wider. Seeing a sign or mailer, or receiving a call, might entice someone to go online and get more information.
Hence, how both online and offline marketing can work together.
What Offline Marketing Strategy Should I Use?
The short answer…use a few.
If you only have one offline marketing strategy, then you will have limited results that are confined to that specific strategy. If you do cold calling, you may get you a few clients; with referrals may get you a few clients; with direct mail may get you a few more clients, and so forth. To grow your business, you should use multiple channels to bring in your ideal clients from various avenues.
Create pillars in your business.
Imagine a home standing on one pillar: if that single pillar breaks, that home is going to come crashing down. Now think of a house that has six or eight pillars. If one breaks, the others will carry the load, allowing you time to fix the one that is broken without seeing any significant decrease in support (revenue). This is especially important in uncertain economic times. Businesses go out of business because they don’t have additional pillars (marketing strategies) to rely on.
Who Should I Target in Offline Marketing?
It’s important to ensure you include a pool of potentially interested customers, and research what they do. Are they a retired community that read a certain newspaper? Are they mobile and driving frequently by certain areas? Do you have signage in various areas that your target market visits?
Most businesses rely on a single method to generate business and don’t plan their campaign carefully. That gives you an instant advantage if you diversify your campaign to include multiple outlets.
You need to find out how to reach the right people with your campaigns. For example, a newspaper ad won’t work if your target market doesn’t subscribe to the paper. Sending postcards won’t work if your target market routinely ignores unsolicited mail, or if you send the postcards to people who aren’t part of your target market. It’s important to know your stuff, do the research, and do not limit to one single strategy.
Your Next Steps
Here is a list of the items you will need to do:
- Create a list of strategies that includes at least five or six different methods of acquiring leads and generating new business.
Don’t sell yourself short by relying on a single strategy that may be ineffective. - Be strategic about where you spend your money. Just because your competitor is advertising in that paper doesn’t mean you have to advertise there, too.
- Research whether the people you are targeting will see (and, hopefully, read) your advertisement.
- Contact a marketing expert/branding expert and ensure that any marketing you do is always consistent and of high-quality branding across all boards.
Note: If marketing, online or offline, is not your expertise, please contact a marketing agency. Doing so will allow you to save money from un-researched spending.
The Key Takeaway
Utilizing online marketing strategies in conjunction with offline marketing can significantly boost your referrals and new client generation. You can have a significant impact on your bottom line, as a result.
We want to help you. Contact us to see what we would recommend for your business.
