With the massive growth of the internet, web-enabled devices, email and social media as marketing tools, many marketers have moved their marketing efforts toward digital approach and forgotten the meaning of true marketing medium that has worked well for ages.
So what is this marketing medium that has been proven well? It's offline marketing. Contrary to popular belief, offline marketing is still a viable tool for winning new leads and converting new customers. But when it comes to cost and time, online marketing is where it wins by far.
Combining the old and effective offline marketing and the new agile and flexible counterpart is especially useful to build a powerful, far-reaching marketing approach.
Online and offline marketing can work together nicely. Businesses can benefit from both, enjoying a stronger boost to their ROI than if they chose one or the other.
Most businesses spend a large percentage of their time and money on promoting their business online and offline to their customers. However, many of these businesses are missing out on the full benefit of their marketing activities because they are not integrating the proven offline activities with the new era of online presence.
The integration between those two is important because businesses will be missing many potential customers if the online and offline efforts aren't working together. For example, if a prospect comes across an advertisement from finds it interesting, they won't be able to access further information about it if you don't put your website address on it. Although with the internet is now accessible from many places, many people are not interested to search for your business because of the effort done is usually not worth their time. This will eventually make them go onward to your competitors.
Potential customers can become very confused if there is not obvious relationship between what they see on your website and what is in on newspaper ads, for example.
To ensure businesses are getting the most value for money out of all their marketing, they should be able to integrate both offline and online marketing to do successful sales.
Match the experience
Your website and all your online marketing efforts should look and feel similar to your offline branding. If your emails don't look the same as your brochures or you use a different logo on your website to the one you use on your offline ads, people won't recognize you as the same brand. This will make you lose customers.
Make sure your corporate logo and colors are consistent throughout all your marketing.
Deliver the same messages
To sell a product, you may use catchy phrases to give potential buyers a tempting offer. These phrases, of messages, that are included in one of your marketing activities should be carried over into all of others.
Not any difference from your logo, your business slogan should also appear on every piece of marketing material that you create. And those same messages that came from particular offline marketing campaigns should also appear on your website as clear as possible.
The best way to get people to remember you as a brand is by giving out consistency throughout the campaign. This is to make sure that the same message is delivered equally all over your campaign.
Put website address on everything
The easiest, fastest and cheapest way to integrate offline and online marketing is by putting your business website address on all your marketing efforts. However, this way is also the most overlooked.
Your website address needs to appear on absolutely everything. There is no reason for your business to have its own professional website if it's not put into a good use. A website for business is meant to be the front door to your business on the internet. If the website address is not visible in any media, it has lost its primary purpose of existing.
Put your business web address on your business cards, letterheads, invoices, brochures, uniforms, billboards and in every single advertisement you create. This will increase your website traffic and your sales leads.
Use the keywords, offline and online
A word may mean everything to someone. This is also true for businesses that want to thrive on the internet. A word that represents your business is something that can become one of the most important factors in marketing campaigns.
To get your online and offline activities working well side-by-side, you need to use the keywords from your offline ads in your website that is optimized for that phrase. This will ensure that people who see your ad offline will find it easy to come to your website. By eliminating others that compete with a specific keyword, you can dominate the internet market by having your product as a "generic brand".
Link landing pages for ads
For your advertising campaigns to be successful, they must have landing pages on your website. To fully integrate your offline and online marketing, any campaigns that you run must be linked to a landing page. So if a prospect sees your offline ad with a particular offer, they can type in the web address they see in the ad and be taken to a page that is all about the offer they saw.
An offer will generate far more leads and sales if it links to an effective landing page.
Conclusion
Successful marketing, both offline and online, is all about consistency to deliver the right message at the appropriate time with a character imprinted on it.
A business with a brand on its shoulders should bring it's identity everywhere it goes. And since marketing is the spearhead for any sales, businesses must be able to bring this brand upfront to represent anything that it is trying to sale.