Chocbait may have been a miserable failure but coordinating your online and offline marketing activities never is. It is easy to become so close to an offline project that online is forgotten and landing pages for various campaigns are not in place in time to benefit the offline marketing push.
Large or small, most businesses engage in both online and traditional offline marketing. Magazine ads, TV ads, local paper ads, bookmarks, flyers and related marketing materials could be easily co-ordinated with your online offerings.
To use the example of a small shop in a town – The shop has an online store where they sell the higher volume goods and sometimes have their “one offs online but the shop front (offline) focuses on advertising to their local community to bring customers in. They may place ads in their local magazine, print their own flyers, and they may even have printed bags with their logo/theme. This type of business could easily reflect their logo and colour themes in their advertising as well as in their website. They could use a mailing list to inform customers of sales in store and possibly attract customers in to the shop who may never walk by it. If you have a small business and don’t have a colour theme or logo, consider it. Logos and themes create an identity for your business and help people remember you when next they want to purchase.
Within larger companies, there can be a disconnect between online and ‘offline’ marketing departments. To help bridge the gap, online marketing folks could try to ensure they and offline meet regularly. One important reason to meet would be so everyone can ensure that when a new campaign goes live offline, online is there ready to take in the searchers. Coffee and doughnuts as enticements can help with the meetings!
Short term campaigns, sales and offers can often be better promoted using pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC is an excellent way to drive traffic to short term offers with highly targeted landing pages. Landing pages for longer term promotions should also be live before the promotions go live offline to ensure spiders have been alerted through sitemaps to their existence and they are ready to receive link love from those writing about the campaigns.
There have been several excellent examples of online and offline co-ordinating including Skys See Speak Surf campaign where a landing page was created and PPC pointing to it as the TV commercials went live. While not everyone operates to those sorts of budgets, it is the idea which can be scaled to fit any business.
Co-ordinating online and offline advertising need not be complicated. This can be anything from something as simple as making sure the same logo, colours and information are online as well as in print, to creating landing pages and running a PPC campaign to promote a special event, sale or campaign. Bring online and offline together and benefit both customers and your business.
