Incorporating Offline Marketing Into Your Online Business

Guest Post: by Vincent Clarke

Offline marketing is making a comeback, and it’s coming back hard. With Google and Yahoo constantly updating their ranking algorithms, it only makes sense that more and more online businesses are growing wary of being too dependent on search engines for generating leads. While diversifying online traffic sources helps, it is equally important to incorporate promotional products, direct mail, and other offline marketing strategies early and often as well.

It’s always important to look at your competitors to see where they’re missing out. As an online business, chances are that none of your competitors are doing any serious offline marketing and networking. That gives you a distinct competitive advantage, even more so if your primary competitors are based overseas and are even less likely to pursue these sources of customers. Here we will list some of the most effective offline marketing strategies specifically geared towards promoting your online business.

But before you go ahead and apply any of these offline marketing strategies, make sure that you really know your local target market.

• What is the demographic?
• What are their interests?
• Where do they go offline?

Once you discover more about who your customers are offline, you’ll understand more about where and how you should be approaching them with these strategies. Also try and collaborate with other small businesses in your area that are relevant to your niche market. This is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get a better understanding of your customers and how they spend their time outside of the internet.

Influence Word of Mouth

Get people talking about you. Not tweeting, pinning, liking, or commenting on blogs. I mean water cooler chats, lunch meetings, and coffee table conversations. People value face to face recommendations and advice much higher than generic online discussions. So your goal should be to find offline ways to naturally get people talking about you in a positive way.

For example, you could persuade customers to recommend you by offering them referral incentives or future discounts. This will not only have them talking about you with their close friends and family, but it will also strengthen their customer loyalty as well.

Perform a Well-Designed Direct Mailing

Ten years ago, people had a great filter for direct mail. Their defenses were up, and nothing was more frustrating than receiving loads and loads of so-called junk mail. But times have changed. Sure, we still receive the occasional flier or credit card offer, but in general, companies have chosen to invest their marketing dollars elsewhere.

Surprisingly, this is great news for you. Do you have a great product? Do you value building a stronger relationship with your customers? Of course you do. Because it has become less prevalent, direct mail has actually become more personal again. People are more likely to have their defenses up for television and internet advertising. On top of that, direct mail is surprisingly inexpensive. Cost-effective, personal, targeted. This offline marketing strategy has it all.

Hand Out Free Promotional Products

Free.

Everyone always seems to go crazy over this word. Shout “Who wants free stuff?” at the next convention you attend and just see how many people immediately stop what they’re doing and head on over to you.

Promotional products are inexpensive, everyday items such as coffee mugs, tote bags, key chains, pens and t-shirts that are freely given away to customers as a marketing tool. Companies that distribute these products will add your business logo and brand on each of your gifts. The idea is that people will use these promotional products throughout their day and expose others to your company name in the process.

In the past couple of years custom usb drives have risen to become one of the most well-received promotional products on the market. Thumb drives are a small devices used to quickly store data and transfer files from one PC to another. With most laptop manufacturers nowadays dropping CD/DVD drives completely in favor of NAND flash storage, more and more people are using flash drives at work, home, and school, making them a great choice for branded impressions.

Add Your URL Address Everywhere

It’s such a simple task that most companies wouldn’t even consider it as a marketing strategy. As an online business, your URL address is the single most important piece of information you can give your customers. If you could only share one thing with a potential lead, it should be your URL address. The idea here is to add your URL address to all of your company materials.

Well, adding it to everything would be a little overkill, so first I’d focus on your business materials. Every day you go through dozens of invoices, checks, packaging, mail, faxes, and other paperwork. Do you have your URL address on all of these items? What about your memo books, pens, doors, and office windows? Any business materials that come in contact with outside individuals should have your URL address professionally imprinted on it.
It’s simple, cheap, and a great way to establish a brand offline.

Buy Offline Ad Spaces

You probably buy ad space online, so why not do the same offline? It’s cheaper than you think and more effective than most of us give it credit for. Unlike press releases or news articles that expect objective stories, ad spaces give you the freedom to promote your online business however you see fit. You can buy offline ad spaces on newspapers, editorials, magazines, comic books, tabloids, park benches, restaurant tables and tons of other places where people spend their time offline.

Typically ad spaces are sold by the amount of space they take up on the page, so you can make it as small or as big as your budget allows. There are also less known publications that generally cost less and target a much more focused group of individuals. Schools and colleges also see ads on campus property and papers. In this respect, I’d start small and test to see how effective the strategy is before moving on to more well-known, costly ad spaces.

Vincent Clarke is an inbound marketing analyst for USB Memory Direct. In addition to managing the company’s online presence, he oversees their social strategies and offline marketing campaigns, including direct mail, trade shows, and event sponsorships. You can find him on Twitter @_vhclarke.