You’ve probably heard of social media, blogs, and web sites. These are all platforms where you can reach potential customers. But did you know that you can also use these networks to conduct marketing offline? That’s right: you can use digital marketing to promote your business physically. It’s a powerful tool which you can use to reach a highly targeted audience and convert them into paying customers. Before you begin your digital marketing journey, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of marketing, especially when conducted offline. Hopefully, this post will help you in taking the first steps towards a successful digital marketing campaign.

The Basics Of Marketing

In order to conduct a successful marketing campaign, you need to start with the basics. These are things like understanding customers’ needs, creating awareness, and measuring the results of your campaign. In this section, we’ll discuss each of these in detail.

Needs

When you’re marketing a product or service, you’re trying to match the needs of your audience (known as the intended group) with the products or services you offer. Sometimes this is easy, but often it’s difficult to know what your audience wants unless you ask them directly. One of the best ways to find out is through market research. In this process, you will try to identify the wants and desires of your audience and determine what they need in order to be engaged with your content. Needs are typically found by simply observing your audience’s behaviour. For example, if you notice that your audience is mostly checking out products on mobile devices, but you don’t offer a mobile version of your site, then you know that they are lacking in a mobile device compatible site.

Awareness

Creating awareness is all about getting people to understand or recognize your product or service. Sometimes, this just means getting the word out there, but sometimes it means changing people’s perceptions of your product or service. One of the best ways to do this is by simply being consistent with your marketing efforts. In marketing, we call this “showing up” and it’s extremely important. When customers see your ads over and over again, they begin to recognize your product or service and associate it with happiness or success.

Action

Once you’ve created awareness about your product or service, all that’s left is for your audience to take action and potentially become a buyer. This is where marketing meets sales. When a customer takes the action you’ve encouraged them to, you’ve successfully created a new lead or customer. Never forget: you can’t sell something you didn’t first create awareness about.

Measuring The Results Of Your Campaign

The last step of any marketing plan is usually reviewing the results of the campaign. If you’ve achieved your goal of increasing brand awareness and turned that into a rush of interested customers, you should be able to easily measure the success of your plan. You can start by looking at the numbers from your website. Did your Google ads lead to a significant increase in traffic? What about your social media accounts: does your Facebook page get a decent amount of engagement?

These are all important metrics which you can use to gauge the success of your campaign. As you continue to get results, you can also measure the impact of your campaign slowly but surely. Did a particular ad lead to a significant increase in sign-ups for a free trial or a paid version of your product? Did a blog post encourage more people to subscribe to your mailing list?

By tracking these metrics, you can ensure that you’re continually improving your plan and getting the best results possible. Don’t forget: this is all about testing and adjusting. The sooner you can find out what’s not working and change it, the better. With every experiment, you’ll learn something new about your audience and your product.

Why Offline Marketing?

Now, we want to briefly discuss why you should consider offline marketing. This is important to understand because while digital marketing is definitely a powerful tool, it is not the only game in town.

The world is becoming more digital. More people are adopting trends and habits that were born in the digital era. That means that some of your customers may not be on social media, or they may not even have heard of it. They may not even be online at all. This is why it’s important to consider going “old school” and promoting your business physically. Maybe you’ve heard of door-to-door salespeople or sidewalk sales: that’s what offline marketing is. You’re going to meet your customers where they are and show them that you’re the person they can trust with their needs.

Offering your products or services through a walk-in or a live chat may seem like a no-brainer: after all, a lot of people are searching for your products and services online, so why not try to meet them where they are? What you may not realize is that most people aren’t using online tools to find products offline. They usually turn to friends, family, or coworkers for advice. These people may not even be aware of your product or service, let alone interested in buying it. So by showing up and getting in front of these people, you have the opportunity to speak directly to your audience and encourage them to become a buyer. You can use digital marketing to get in touch with your audience and create awareness, but what you’re going to do directly is conversion and revenue.

Strategies For Offline Marketing

Now that you’re aware of the importance of marketing and the basics behind it, you can begin to strategize. Below, we’ll discuss several different methods you can use to reach your audience and convert them into paying customers.

1. Cold-Calling

Cold-calling is another name for “calling someone unannounced”. This is usually a difficult tactic to implement, but it’s one of the most effective ways to market your products or services. When you call someone and introduce yourself without any previous arrangements, you’re putting yourself out there as a stranger. This may not seem like a good idea at first, but you’ll be amazed at how willing people are to talk to a stranger about a product or service they’re actually interested in.

If you’re new to the field, this may seem like a daunting task, but you can get help from a telemarketing company or hire a call-taker for a few hours a week. Just make sure you prepare for the awkwardness of being unannounced. You’ll often find that people are hesitant to talk to a complete stranger about a product they’re not familiar with. So be sure to pre-screen calls and only pick up the phone if you feel confident that the person on the other end is who they say they are.

2. Trade Shows

Another great way to promote your business physically is to participate in trade shows. A trade show is an event where businesses from all over the world come together to connect with potential customers. These shows usually take place in large convention centers or hotels and feature hundreds of exhibitors showing off their latest and greatest wares.

You have the opportunity to promote your business at these events and gain valuable leads. The key is to find an industry event that is relevant to your product or service. These shows usually span over a few days and feature a variety of industry experts discussing the latest trends and technologies. If your product or service is related to the exhibits, you’re bound to find an event that you can participate in. Just make sure that you register in advance and follow the rules set by the show’s organizer.

3. Social Media And Blogging

Nowadays, everyone and their mother has a social media account. It would be a missed opportunity if you don’t try to reach your audience on social media. Building a following on social media is easier than you think: just connect with people in your niche and you’ll find that most of them are eager to follow you.

You may consider social media to be an extension of your website, but it’s a bit more complex than that. Different platforms like Instagram and Twitter let you post both videos and text, which is perfect for product and service demonstrations. Just remember: you can never post too much! Never think that just because you have a following on social media that you’ve said your piece and can stop promoting. This is the opposite: now that you’ve gained a foothold on social media, you can use your accounts to keep sharing content that is relevant to your niche and garner more and more followers. This is how you get exposure and grow your business.