A good offline marketing strategy can help you to promote your online presence and generate a lot of high-quality traffic to your website. Ever since the internet marketing explosion, many business owners have begun devoting a lot of their attention and resources to marketing online. However, it’s still important that you don’t limit yourself to online marketing only, offline marketing is still a powerful strategy and it most likely always will be. After all, just as radio advertising did not make print advertising obsolete and TV advertising did not make radio advertising obsolete, so internet marketing will never make offline marketing completely obsolete.
This article will deal with three key offline strategies that can be used to drive masses of qualified traffic to your website and thus build your email subscriber list and aid you in promoting your online products.
Offline Marketing Strategy #1: Publicity
Creating publicity around your company and your brand might very well be the most advanced and sophisticated form of marketing. This is because publicity looks nothing like marketing, but it still attracts a LOT of attention and positions your company as an authority. Of course, it’s important that your publicity strategies are attracting the attention of people who will be interested enough in your products to become customers. One of the best ways to create this kind of positive publicity is to team with non-for-profit or charitable organizations that your customers might be interested in.
For example, if you sell educational resources for business owners or for parents who are homeschooling their children, you can find a non-for-profit that helps people to get an education and to learn to read. If you’re selling dog training products, you can team up with animal rescue organizations or wildlife conservation charities. There are several ways to do this, one is to donate a portion of your profits to the organization. Other strategies might involve having your employees participate in a fundraising event or including information about the non-for-profit in your company publications.
Many businesses do this and also create press releases announcing the collaboration between themselves and the non-for-profit. Always provide links to your website so that people can visit it and find out what your company is all about. This gets your company and your website into the public eye and in front of people who will trust you as a company that is involved in helping the world become a better place, which is great for inspiring trust with potential customers.
Offline Marketing Strategy #2: Direct Mail Campaigns
Direct mail advertising is one of the most solid and proven strategies for marketing your company. It’s been around since before the radio and before television and it continues to deliver results, even with the invention of the internet. The tricky part is targeting your direct mail campaigns in such a way that you can justify the cost of creating and printing all of the pieces and having them mailed out. A great way to do this is to build a subscriber list and collect physical addresses from your customers whenever they purchase something from you, online, offline, or anywhere else.
Many companies are accomplishing this by selling shippable products online and then using direct mail and email advertising to keep their messages in front of their customers. Another option is purchasing targeted mailing lists of people who are already interested in your products or services or using other offline campaigns (fundraising events as mentioned in the previous segment) to collect the physical addresses of your customers. The more creative ways you have to get your message in front of your prospective customers, the more attention you can generate for your website and for your business.
Offline Marketing Strategy #3: Print Advertising and Media Buys
Media buys are another great way to generate offline attention for your company and for your website: print ads, television commercials, radio advertising, etc. For example, if you have a product that has been selling very well online and which has a proven track record for getting results and a good collection of case studies and customer testimonials, that’s a great opportunity to set yourself up for success using a radio broadcast, print advertising in trade magazines which your customers read or even by having an infomercial done for your product.
While this might sound expensive and even risky compared to online marketing, if you test your campaign online through video marketing or through online advertising methods like PPC and email marketing first you can reduce your risk quite a bit. You can start with a few videos on YouTube which have miniature commercials for your product and test which videos are getting the best responses. You can also split test PPC ads and find out which headlines and offers are generating the most responses. If these things work very well online, there’s a very good chance that they’ll also work offline.
Conclusion
If you’re not already using all of these offline marketing strategies, what can you start doing to get them working for your company? Get a plan together and start leveraging the power of offline marketing by using publicity, direct mail or media buys to boost your credibility and to generate more traffic to your website.
