When it comes to marketing it seems that the world has been overtaken with online marketing and digital strategies. Let’s face it, many companies have long given up hope on traditional marketing measures and are going completely digital.
While you might think that this is what’s best for your business, there are a few things that you will want to consider about focusing on your your offline marketing effort so that you can make the most of your full marketing plan for both online and offline market.
The following are just three ways that you can easily incorporate offline marketing into your digital strategies.
Top 3 Ways to Incorporate Offline Marketing
1. Get Your Digital Brand Equity Noticed
Just because you have a strong online presence, it doesn’t mean that you also have a strong offline presence. This can be particularly damaging to your business in a number of ways.
Here’s one: Neglecting your offline presence means that you are missing out on a huge potential market that is not that Internet-savvy. Just because the millenials and a part of the older generations are online, that doesn’t mean that everyone is. In fact, many people who are in the 40+ age group are not online, which means that they don’t have a lot of exposure to brands who primarily use a digital marketing plan.
The bottom line, if you rely only on digital marketing, you are missing out on many consumers who might be interested in your products and services.
So the first step in solving the problem is making sure that you start to get your digital brand equity noticed offline. You can start with company branded stickers and labels on items and distributing them locally. Your Twitter handle, website address, Facebook fan page – you can have your digital properties distributed offline easily with the help of stickers and labels.
Distribute those to your current customers for free and (hopefully) they will share the freebies with their friends and family.
2. Participate in Events and Shows
Another great thing that you can do for your business is make sure that you attend events and trade shows. You can do branding as much as you like on store, but if you want much more exposure, events and shows are your best options.
Indeed, businesses often overlook the events and shows in their area. These are really a hidden marketing gem because booth fees are generally low and they allow you to be able to hand out your promotional branded items, like stickers, pens and so on. Best of all is that you are probably giving your branded stickers and other promotional materials to people who have never heard of your business.
You can try a more creative approach, such as making your booth interactive in such a way that visitors can interact with your digital brand properties – e.g. rewarding your product/services on the spot when visitors tweet to their followers or take a selfie inside your booth and share it on Instagram.
If you have never been to a trade show, these suggestions can help you out.
3. Integrating Mobile Devices
In a world where nearly everyone has a mobile device you will find that using mobile phone marketing plans is a great idea. One of the best things about these plans is that they can help flawlessly integrate marketing offline and online with ease.
There are a number of things that you can do to help make your presence well known when someone is using a cell phone. One of these is to offer QR codes on stickers or any other marketing materials that only be accessed by visiting your mobile site, liking your fan page, etc.
Another thing that is easy to do is offering special deals and incentives to those who are using their mobile phones. This can be done with special coupons through text message or by being on a text message email list.
Takeaway
Indeed, adopting offline marketing strategies is still important in the digital world. While most people are rapidly moving ahead through the digital age, there are still those who prefer ‘the old ways’. Your ability in catering both online and offline market will give you an edge over your competition.