When it comes to marketing, most businesses will use a variety of techniques in order to reach the maximum amount of their target audience. With technology developing all the time, it is possible to market your business nearly 24 hours a day.
Online marketing has a reputation for being more popular, efficient and cost-effective than offline marketing for businesses of today. Some companies even ignore offline marketing altogether. However, only 58% of marketers say they are often successful in achieving their marketing goals. This is why it is important to think about how offline marketing tactics can still be extremely beneficial when combined with the ones online.
What is offline and online marketing?
Offline marketing is the term for marketing undertaken through media which is traditionally offline. Examples of offline marketing would be television, billboards and radio as well as distributing books, catalogues and manuals many businesses can create by using booklet makers.
Online marketing refers to advertising goods and services using online or digital strategies. Examples of online marketing include articles, videos and podcasts. Traditionally, companies would have used offline marketing, but the increasing spread of technology has led to more and more companies favouring advertising online.
When employing multiple marketing strategies, you should make sure your branding is cohesive. You can achieve this by coordinating your offline and online marketing. By integrating the two, you can maximise your reach and be noticed by lots of different audiences.
Coordinating your offline and online marketing
One simple way to integrate offline and online marketing is to encourage your customers to give their email addresses. Though your customers could opt out of this feature and remember to opt in only later, collecting email addresses in this way could provide your advertising with a new avenue.
You could use your offline marketing, like using booklets, to promote a competition or a giveaway. To enter, all they have to do is sign up to your website or enter their email address online. This would give you their contact information for future digital marketing.
Conversely, you could run a competition online to inspire some offline content. Maybe, for your monthly magazine, you want people to submit photos of them using your products – or you want to include these people’s reviews in the adverts you put in the newspaper.
One advantage of online marketing is that you can collect or generate data about your consumers. By taking this data and analysing it, you can more easily develop targeted adverts. It can also give you information on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to getting their attention – and so allow you to develop your marketing strategy until it is close to perfect.
Overall, both online and offline marketing are successful in their own right. Some people prefer physical newspapers or adverts on the telly. Some people prefer to see a post on Instagram or an email in their inbox. No answer is right or wrong. To maximise your reach as a company, it is key to integrate your online and offline marketing – and to do so cohesively.
