The whole idea of marketing, whether online or offline, is to create brand awareness and generate more revenue.
Think of marketing as communicating.
Communication is most effective when you’re applying consistent messages for your brand and product across all mediums your target audience could come in contact. This is most efficiently accomplished by integrating your offline and online marketing strategies so that your target audience recognizes your product and brand from first glance.
Here are the best five tips on how to achieve this.
Be Consistent
All of your offline and online materials should encompass the same components. The logo, message, colors and graphics should be replicated through all of your marketing strategies.
If your target audience has come in contact with your brand offline, they should be able to recognize the brand online as well.
For example, it wouldn’t make much sense to use a different color schemes for your online marketing than you have your offline.
Make your brand recognizable across all mediums from a first glance.
Promote Your Website
Whether you’re mailing out postcards and coupons or passing out brochures and catalogs, all of your offline material should promote your website. And by everything, I mean everything.
Consider creating some “teasers” on your offline material so your target audience will have incentive to visit your website. Make the journey fun and intriguing. One way of doing this is through QR codes.
You’ve gone to the trouble to establish and keep up your website, so utilize it!
Match Keywords
The keywords you’re employing for your offline marketing strategies should also be utilized for your online strategies.
This way when your target audience comes in contact with the product offline, they will easily be able to use a search engine to find more information on that product.
Use Social Media
If you’re spending the time and money to create awareness for a product offline, it makes sense to promote it through social media.
Twitter and Facebook are where consumers go to be social as well as learn and discuss brands and products.
Here you will reach the portion of your target audience that hasn’t taken the step to visit your website while at the same time be able to manage your brand’s reputation.
Be sure to also enable social sharing icons so when someone does visit your website they can easily share that product on their favorite social networks.
Product Placement
If you’ve made the effort to promote a particular product offline, make sure that product is easily found on your website.
Promote it on the website’s home page so visitors can easily find it and be navigated to the product’s own page to learn more about the offer.
Your website visitors should never have to guess what to do next. If finding your product isn’t straightforward, they’ll probably give up and search elsewhere.
The point is that most consumers don’t want to have to go to a lot of work to find your brand or product, especially if they’re still in education mode, so make this process as easy and simple as possible.
If they’ve seen a product through an offline ad they need to be able to recognize it as they surf the net, and vice versa. The more they come in contact with your brand or product, the more comfortable they’ll become with your company.
Think of it like the stranger you pass by on your way to work every day. Even though you may have never spoken to each other, the fact that you see their face time and time again creates a sense of familiarity. They no longer seem like a stranger.
The same goes for your brand. This is why it’s crucial all of your marketing campaigns work together for one goal.
Let us know what ways you’re integrating your on and offline marketing strategies!
About Matt
By combining your online and offline marketing efforts, you can certainly see more conversions and sales. Marketing is really essential for the success of any business. It builds your brand and whenever people require something which you offer, they would directly come to you instead of going somewhere else.
Hi Matt, you know I’ve seriously been considering adding a Blog Engage banner on my car. I mean there must be bloggers in my local area that don’t know about my community. I think it could help a lot to get some more active bloggers that are from my area to just bring Blog Engage to the next level. Being consistent is so important in fact I just had a post mentioning this quality and a positive for any blogger.
bbrian017 recently posted..Take Your Blog Engagement To The Next Level
Just be sure that banner has a nice, clear CTA! Bumper stickers are fun, but it’s rare for folks to remember them after commuting.
Matt recently posted..In Memory – Big Tex is On Fire at the Texas State Fair
Not a bad idea, Brian!
Your namesake Brian, from HotBlogTips.com, just did it.
He added a nice banner in the back window of his car.
I think you can receive some good results and visibility from this marketing action!
May be the next step is thinking of print some old fashioned T-Shirts with your ads?
This is totally new: having the same keywords in both online and offline marketing campaigns. I should try this idea too.
Cristian Stan recently posted..Best Portable Generator Reviews 2012
Hope you see success from it!
Matt recently posted..In Memory – Big Tex is On Fire at the Texas State Fair
Thanks, Matt. I hope so too, I don’t like working for nothing
Have a nice day!
Cristian Stan recently posted..Kitchenaid Food Processor
all the tips you mentioned are critical for marketing success. social media is a great tool to promote anything and without consistency, visibility is lost in no time and if the product itself is not placed well, then there is no point in promoting that. thanks for sharing them.
akhilendra recently posted..Residential Apartment in Sector-4 Dwarka, Delhi
Hello Matt, I agreed with all the points you have mentioned here.
We should make sure about keywords, Never do it over
Sunil recently posted..Google Plus- Is it Dead?
These are some of the great pointers. I wasn’t aware about the concept of matching the online and offline keywords. This strategy sounds enticing to me. Thanks for the share.
Aayna recently posted..Architecture and nature co-existing happily together – is it possible?
Great post Matt, very useful information, especially the use of social media to promote your website.
Twitter and Facebook are 2 very powerful marketing tools for your blog or product. I personally use Facebook a lot when promoting my latest post because it drives a quick rush of visitor every time.
In my opinion there should be a perfect balance between promoting your blog and adding content to it. Overdoing one of them and leaving the other behind can have negative results, I know this from my own experience.
Looking forward to your next post Matt, good luck to you.
Philip A. recently posted..Guest Posting – Why Should You Write On Other Blogs?
Good PR Robert all great info for people to follow to build their business thanks for sharing
AG Infosoft recently posted..Bad Links – How to Tackle this Problem
Hi Matt,
Doing some offline marketing is particularly good if your website intends to target your local market – this is whether you’re dealing with products or services. Having a social media account to backup your marketing strategy is also a good idea since many customers search for brand or company names using social media.
These are well made points indeed, Matt. But sometimes there are bloggers who are too shy to indulge in this type of publicity. SO they might not adopt all such tactics.
That being said, blogging necessarily requires all the attention it can get-so your points can definitely come in very useful. Thanks for sharing !
I just wanted to follow up regarding the accuracy of the 500,000 visitors claim. I have confirmed on Twitter (http://twitter.com/mr_mcd/stat… that this was the number of visitors to the site during the sale previous to the one discussed above (as reported). Mark (of codegent) was very helpful though obviously unable to share the client data with us.
I was hoping he might add a comment here on the blog but if he doesn’t you can always try to get in touch with him on Twitter if you have specific questions about the 10 second issue you mention.
Just one more indicator that Alexa data can be way off at times and probably isn’t good for looking at granular traffic information (in bursts like this).
Hope this helps and let me know if you need anything else.
nikol recently posted..Facebooker hires woman to slap him
Alexa can be fairly unreliable, but there aren’t too many site rankers out there that can do much better. The problem is that Alexa browsing statistics are based on browsing with the Alexa toolbar, so it can be much higher or lower than it really is. Compete is a little better, but you need to have a very successful site just to see data.
Matt recently posted..How To Do Everything An Online Marketing Agency Does For Free (And Why You Still Need One)
I agree that integrating online and offline marketing efforts is important. If your business mainly serves a local area, something that is also really great useful is geo-targeted display ads, which can spread your brand over a wider range of web traffic but still concentrate on viewers that are near your business location.