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Posts Tagged ‘offline marketing’
Friday, July 15th, 2011
Some people call it “integrative marketing.” I think that’s a good phrase, but regardless of what you call it, small businesses struggling in a down economy should spend a little time thinking about how they market themselves. Cutting marketing out of your budget altogether shouldn’t be an option, but you have to pay attention to where your dollars are going.
Online marketing has traditionally been less expensive than offline marketing, and in many ways it is. But if it doesn’t produce any results, it could be more expensive.
That’s why you should look carefully at where every marketing dollar is going and one way to do that is to sync up your online and offline marketing efforts. What does that mean? It means that your message across all marketing channels should be consistent. You might target different segments of your market through each channel, but your message ought to be same.
For instance, if you sell yellow widgets at discount prices, then try to keep the focus of your online and offline marketing collateral on selling the benefits of your proposition. Don’t focus on yellow widgets in one medium and discount prices on another. Rather, focus on the best benefits in every medium through which you advertise.
Marketing is basically the same in the 21st century, with a little bit of a twist. Consumers are tired of being interrupted. They want to feel like they have more control over what they see. So pull them in, don’t push.
Tags: Branding, offline marketing, online marketing
Posted in Traditional Marketing for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Monday, February 21st, 2011
A lot has been said of Facebook Pages. The general consensus is that they make great marketing promos for businesses of any size. They are particularly useful for small businesses. However, you still have to promote them.
How do you promote your Facebook Page? I would bet that you do most of it online through your other Internet marketing channels. These might include:
- Your website
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Social bookmarking
- HubPage or Squidoo Lens
- Facebook advertising
- Online display advertising
- Your blog
- Mobile phone apps
The list could go on, I’m sure. But have you considered offline marketing?
Offline marketing still works. In fact, a very powerful way to market any business is through the integration of online and offline marketing channels. You could use any or all of the following offline marketing channels to drive new traffic to your Facebook Page as well as your website.
- Television
- Radio
- Magazine advertising
- Newspaper advertising
- Telemarketing
- Seminars
- Brochures & Flyers
- In-store displays
- Direct mail
- Even word of mouth
Facebook Pages have become their own stand-alone marketing materials for many businesses. I wouldn’t recommend them in lieu of a website, but many businesses use them to great effect. A lot of those businesses promote their Facebook Pages offline. Maybe you should too.
Tags: facebook, Facebook pages, offline marketing, online marketing
Posted in Traditional Marketing for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
Local search is great if you service just one geographic area. If you service an area that is greater than 50 miles in radius, then you’ll find that local search is good for delivering local customers, but useless for delivering customers from further afield. At present, there is no easy way around this so you need to start thinking outside the square.
To target search results from another town, without setting up a physical presence in that town, needs at the very least a digital presence. You can achieve this by having pages on your website that are dedicated to the areas you do serve. Each page needs to be well optimized with particular attention being paid to including regional place names in titles, URLs, and headings. Each page should outline the services you provide and when you provide them – for example, if you visit that town once a week, then specify those days and your service hours.
You can reinforce those pages through social media. If you can encourage your customers from those areas to ‘like’ those particular pages, so much the better. The bottom line is, you are going to have to compete in search results for those areas as an outsider. For specific searches, you should still find it relatively easy to gain a good position, although it may well be below the local search results.
Local offline marketing can also help to deliver you customers. However, this of course will do little for search results. Over time, Google will no doubt discover ways that will allow local businesses to compete in local searches in areas away from their geographic center. When they do, those dedicated pages will make a great starting point.
Tags: google, local search, offline marketing, social media marketing
Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
Rand Fishkin wrote a blog post this morning about doing SEO on products without search demand. He suggests four techniques that are, well, rather creative. He suggests:
- Substitution
- Compare
- Attract the Audience
- Build the Brand
All of these, of course, are doable.
Rand’s post got me to thinking about search demand. Can you create search demand out of scratch? Would Rand’s four strategies naturally create search demand?
Rand’s first suggestion is to substitute a phrase using a similar product where you would normally describe your new innovation. For instance, “Plidget: It’s The New Widget.”
The problem with this is you’ll capture traffic for “widget”, which is the point, but no one is going to know to search for “plidget.” However, you can teach them to search for that term if you associate in their minds your new term with the old term and be sure to distinguish the difference. Is it a challenge? Absolutely. But it can be done.
A similar thing can be done with a helpful comparison. Instead of substituting “plidget” for “widget”, explain how the “plidget” is similar to the “widget” because it allows you to showcase local retail products in your store window in real time as products from other stores similar to yours are turned over. It will take some time, but eventually you could create a demand for the search term “plidget” if you associate the proper qualities with the product name.
If you attract an audience for your product to your website and showcase that product on the site itself, promote the product through your e-mail marketing campaigns, and do some effective off-line marketing where you embed top-of-mind awareness of the “plidget” in people’s brains, then you can create future search demand based on this ongoing marketing. The key is to embed top-of-mind awareness for the search term by associating it with the product you want people to search for.
Many of these techniques rely on traditional marketing strategies. They can work online just as well as offline, and you can create search demand where it before it hasn’t existed.
Tags: offline marketing, online marketing, product marketing, search demand, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
This article at WebProNews isn’t really about how offline news affects search rankings, but it made me think about it.
From the article:
“Some trends have continued over the years, for example pop-princess Britney Spears made the list every year, while some trends changed drastically, largely thanks to new technology like mobile devices,” a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews.
Back in 2001, the top ten list featured things like Napster, NASCAR, the IRS, and of course the World Trade Center. In fact, there had not been another news event to reach a year’s top ten list of Yahoo searches until the infamous BP oil spill of this past year.
The decade in search was largely dominated by entertainment and celebrity queries like Spears, Kim Kardashian, Megan Fox, Miley Cyrus, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, Eminem, Justin Bieber, 50 Cent, etc.
Yahoo! search trends have always been about what is popular offline. Celebrities usually hit the top search lists. Notice that the World Trade Center and the BP oil spill are the only two hard news items in ten years to hit the top search list. That’s not surprising. But those two made the lists because they are super huge news items that affect a lot of people. But you can generally expect the most popular celebrities, books, music, and movies of the day to dominate the Yahoo! search results.
That’s also true of search engine Bing. It’s less true of Google, though it is true to some extent. I believe when local search is as big as general search is today then it will likely be true of local search as well. In other words, when offline news on the local level is popular, you’ll be able to expect that people will search for information on that local news through one of the popular search engines.
So, how can marketers use this information? For starters, pay attention to the news. What is important to people offline? Figure that out and you can predict with some reasonable accuracy what the short-term search trends will be.
Another thing you should do is watch the online search trends. This will clue you in to what is important to people offline. Adjust your marketing aim based on that and conduct your search engine marketing to reflect the reality of the news cycle. Whether it is hard news, business news, celebrity news, or something else, you can target the trends with astonishing success.
Tags: internet marketing, local search, offline marketing, search marketing, SEO
Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »
Thursday, December 30th, 2010
Online and offline marketing often are looked at as separate channels and in reality they are. However, they should operate together under the umbrella of integrated marketing. Frank Reed at Marketing Pilgrim makes this point quite well:
If companies are serious that revenue generation is the number one objective for e-mail marketing the idea of supporting every marketing effort, both offline and online, should be a very close second in importance.
He said this in response to a survey that revealed that 25% of respondents thought that e-mail marketing supporting offline marketing efforts not very important. I have to agree that this is head-scratching data indeed.
So what are the areas of importance for e-mail marketing? According to data provided by MarketingSherpa, in order of importance, they are:
- Increasing sales revenue
- Improving customer relations
- Increasing lead generation
- Increasing website traffic
- Building brand awareness
- Increasing size of e-mail opt-in lists
- Supporting offline marketing programs
- Engaging social media audiences
So Frank’s contention is in reconciling the most important (increasing sales revenue) with the support of offline marketing programs. If you believe that the most important thing for your e-mail marketing campaigns is to increase your revenues, then shouldn’t it stand to reason that you’d place support of your offline marketing programs in high regard? You’d think so.
Here at Small Business Mavericks, we believe that e-mail marketing should support your offline marketing programs. Your online and offline marketing channels should be mutually supportive. If they are, then you’ll meet all of the other goals that are mentioned above. You’ll have the whole shebang.
I don’t know about you, but e-mail marketing to me means integrated marketing. And that’s how we do it.
Tags: e-mail marketing, integrated marketing, marketing channels, offline marketing, online marketing
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 2 Comments »
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
There are hundreds of thousand of small businesses that have both an online and an offline presence. Most have not undertaken any local internet marketing at all. You will often hear the term ‘bricks and mortar’ business. These are the businesses that are set up with an actual building where customers can visit and buy or deal directly. There are probably ten times that number that have a bricks and mortar business and no online business. There is a lot to be learned from the traditional forms of marketing used by those bricks and mortar businesses.
The humble business card has to be one of the most under utilized resources around. Do you have a business card? Do you use it? Business cards were popular for a reason. They are small yet contain a wealth of information. For online marketers, a business card that highlights your business along with your email address and web site urls is a must.
If you are selling products that require mailing, attach a business card to the invoice – you will be surprised how cards are retained at the receiving end. Business cards are not the only channel used. Letters, invoices, envelopes, in fact, any stationary used by your business should have your online details on display.
How does this relate to local online marketing? Your customers may not be aware you have a blog, or a secondary website, or even your email address. There are times when your customers cannot even remember the url of a product they have purchased, which is a problem for you if they are recommending the product. Having a business card makes life much easier, your customer just passes the business card on, effectively continuing the marketing for you.
Local internet marketing can still learn from what has worked offline in the past. Whilst we now live in what has been dubbed the electronic age, some paper based marketing still works effectively.
Tags: business cards, offline marketing
Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 14 Comments »
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