Most business owners are well aware of the benefits of online marketing. It is a fact that 80% of all business-to-consumer (B2C) sales now happen online. However, having a website is not enough – you need to drive sales offline too.
Offline marketing, also known as traditional marketing, refers to marketing activities that happen in person. It predominantly includes TV advertising, billboards, magazine articles, radio spots, and trade shows.
While the benefits of online marketing are undeniable, many business owners hesitate to adopt an all-online strategy. After all, if you’re not generating sales online, where do you go? You might as well throw away all your hard work and devote your time to the next big thing.
Not True. There are plenty of ways to generate sales offline that you can integrate into your online strategy. In fact, integrating and scaling offline marketing efforts while maintaining a presence online is one of the best things you can do for your business.
In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use online marketing to generate sales from your website – even if you don’t have an internet marketing strategy yet.
Why Offline Marketing Works
Even if you haven’t seen it yourself, you’ve probably heard of the power of word of mouth marketing. Simply put, people talk about products or services that they feel are good, so others will choose to try them out too. This is why offline marketing is so effective – you are actively communicating with potential customers who are close enough to observe and respond to your offers.
When someone hears about your product or service from someone they trust, it’s referred to as a trusted source. HubSpot’s Senior Manager of Marketing Essie Acolatse comments, “Trusted sources are people, organizations, or websites that customers feel they can trust. These are the people and channels that they will turn to first for information, especially when compared to the large number of options available today.”
Trusted sources are important because people naturally judge a book by its cover, and yours is full of valuable information about your products, services, and industry. If someone reads an informative and trustworthy book covering your industry, they will most likely come back to your website to learn more about what you have to offer.
Let’s say you’re a realtor – you have a good reputation, your marketing is effective, and you have a quality website. You probably don’t need to do much to get the ball rolling – people will naturally come back to your website after reading a good book on real estate or talking to a friend about their realtor experience.
However, if you want to grow your business significantly, you’ll need to expand your efforts into the offline world too. This is where you can really leverage the power of word of mouth marketing and earn the trust of your customers.
How to Integrate Offline and Online Marketing
If you are looking to integrate your online and offline marketing efforts, there are a few essential steps you need to take to ensure that both strategies work together seamlessly.
The first step is to decide which parts of your business will be handled offline and which parts will be handled online. For example, if you are a realtor, you’ll need to decide whether your office staff or independent contractors will handle clients’ inquiries and showings. The same goes for customer service, order-taking, and paperwork – are all these things best handled by your website, social media, or email marketing?
Once you’ve made this decision, you can start to think about what you’ll need to do to ensure that your online and offline marketing efforts work well together. For example, you may decide that your social media handle will be used only for online marketing and that all your website content will be focused on informing and engaging with potential customers rather than just showing off your product or service.
Make Sure That Offline Marketing Is Scalable
Being able to scale up and down as needed is important when running any business. However, especially when trying to achieve growth quickly, you must be able to adapt to changes in volume. If you don’t, you’ll likely encounter problems – either your current strategies won’t be effective anymore or you’ll need to completely revamp your approach.
As your business grows, so does your need to scale up your offline marketing efforts. Maybe you’ll need to hire more staff to handle increased order volumes or you’ll need to rent more office space. It’s important to be able to determine what is causing your business to grow and what you can do to make sure it stays in that state.
If you’re unable to scale up your offline marketing, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. Maybe you’ll need to reduce the hours you work or look for additional sources of income.
Ensure That Offline Marketing Is Measurable
Even if you’ve never had an issue with being able to measure the success of your business, you should still consider implementing a measuring tool. After all, the practice of marketing is becoming more and more data-driven, and this trend will continue to grow.
When it comes to measuring the results of your offline marketing efforts, you have a few options. You can track the number of visitors to your website, how much traffic you get from various platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), or the number of leads that you generate through various channels (e.g., emails, social media).
If you want to succeed in business, you need to find a way to measure the results of your efforts. However, you must ensure that these measurements are not contaminated by the digital world – you want to make sure that your online and offline strategies are not influencing the results that you’re tracking.
To do this, you can use special tools that will track these results without being touched by humans. For example, you can use Google Analytics to track the results of your website – even if you don’t have a Google account, you can still use their free tool.
When it comes to measuring the results of your offline marketing efforts, it is important to look for a service that is tailored to your needs. Big data and marketing automation tools that are designed to help businesses succeed are the perfect example of a service that provides measurement without the need for constant human intervention.
Takeaway
As businesses continue to evolve, so do marketing strategies. However, even though most business owners are aware of the power of online marketing, they often hesitate to adopt an all-online approach.
The truth is, you can still generate sales and establish a reputable brand while maintaining a remote presence through digital marketing. For best results, combine digital and traditional marketing to reach your target audience where they are – whether that’s online or offline.