Using Offline Marketing To Drive Traffic To Your Website

For website owners, it’s easy to dismiss offline marketing techniques and focus all your marketing efforts online. But this can be a costly mistake for your business. Online businesses have long known the benefits of integrated marketing campaigns, where your audience is exposed to your message across multiple mediums. This technique is well known by bigger businesses, but the same thinking often fails to trickle down to everyone else.

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Have you ever noticed an ad on television, the side of a bus, and on the Internet, all in the same week? This is a very deliberate strategy based on the idea of switching the environment in which you see the advertisement. As you are exposed to the same message in different environments, you reawaken your senses and think about the brand and the message more deeply.

When you market your website offline, you do exactly the same as the big brands that splash their ads over lots of different mediums. You give people a chance to reawaken their senses and think about your business in a deeper way, caused by seeing your brand in a new context.

Imagine you run a small design firm that relies on its website to win new clients. Your customers are based all over the country, and you communicate mostly by email. You are never going to spend money on a television campaign or print marketing, so how exactly can you reach your nationwide audience offline?

With a small budget, reaching an audience offline can seem impossible, but there are a few clever ideas to make it easy. The first step is to send the occasional item in the mail. This is very cost effective, because you are only targeting the right type of customer. Instead of spending lots of money to reach an untargeted audience, you spend money on reaching exactly the right people.

A great idea is to send something in the post that people will keep. Send them a one-off thank you card, and that could work well, but they’re unlikely to leave it lying around their home or office. But send them a Promotional calendar for 2014, like these from Halo, and they will keep it until the end of the year. And not only will they keep it, but other people in their home or office will see it as well.

Studies have shown that brand recognition is one of the most important factors in click through rates online. People are much more likely to click on advertisements for companies that they themselves recognize and trust. When you market your business offline, you will see the same effect.

Imagine you were looking for a plumbing company. You searched Google and found hundreds of results. Would you be more likely to click on the company you recognize or the hundreds you don’t? This is also why offline marketing is so important. It gives you a chance to reach your audience before they are ready to buy, and ready to choose which company to work with.

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