Use Offline Marketing to Drive Your Online Business

Traditional marketing methods are still a viable resource to engage customers, and you can use them to drive buyers to your online products as well!

Traditional marketing includes newspapers, magazines, catalogues, fliers, direct mail, business cards, radio and TV ads, and specialty products, such as pens with your logo.  These communications have been successful since the printing press, and now they can enhance your online marketing.   Here’s how.

Think of each of the traditional communications as your pre-sell for your online presence.  Imagine that you have a vitamin product, particularly helpful for eye health.  Place an ad, perhaps in a health magazine,  that extols the benefits of the product and sends the buyers to your pitch page online for testimonials and to purchase.  You have just used traditional marketing—the magazine– to direct buyers to an online purchase.

Here’s another great example.  Imagine you are a CPA in business for yourself, and you’ve recently joined the Chamber Of Commerce.  Attending one of their “Business After Hours” functions, you give out several of your business cards, and point out that more information about your services is available at your website.  When a prospect visits your website, all your accreditations, education, awards, community service, family profile, and available services are front and center.  Your site is easily navigable, and with each click, you are building credibility with the visitor.  Although your product is your service, and that is done in person, traditional marketing—your business card– drives people to your website to pre-sell them, and predispose them to select you for a CPA.

Here’s yet one more example, to get your marketing juices flowing.   Imagine you run a small local bakery which specializes in ten different kinds of pralines, shipped all over the U.S.   Twelve weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday, your brochures are sent to a large mailing list of former and prospective customers.  Your brochure is beautifully appetizing, but it can’t hope to cover all the pertinent information for shipped orders, so customers are directed online.   At your website, every kind of praline is pictured, and testimonials abound by satisfied customers from Maine to Oregon.   You don’t take phone orders anymore, as every available worker is packing pralines, so all orders are done via the website.   And how did your customers find you?  Traditional marketing in the form of your brochure brought them to you.

Don’t abandon offline marketing in your online efforts, for you may well find that the sum of the two is mathematically even more profitable than either one alone!