Why is Online Marketing Strategy incomplete without a sound Offline Promotion?

When marketing your business, identifying and making use of the behaviors of the audience you target is practically everything that you do. 

Each audience you target has its own uniqueness. Therefore, the marketing strategies you choose will be different from one business to another. Both the online marketing strategies and the offline promotions are important for business. This article will look at the reasons why online marketing strategy is incomplete without the offline promotion and how you can integrate the two strategies.

So let’s learn!

So, why is online marketing strategy incomplete without a sound offline promotion?

Among audiences and businesses, people almost have the same behavior, which is carrying their devices to offline places and using the online platforms to share the experiences they had offline.

Both online marketing strategies and offline promotions have their own importance and roles in marketing. However, when you use one and leave out the other, you are not likely to get the best results. For instance, if you only put too much emphasis on using only the online marketing strategies you might cut out and limit your business from reaching out to some of the audiences offline and vice versa.

Hence, to market your business successfully as you relate to the behavior of the audience you target, you must amalgamate the online and offline strategies. Therefore, using the online marketing strategy alone without the offline promotion is not enough. They both have to go hand in hand in order to attract great results.

Wondering how you can integrate the two?

Let’s find out how you can!

Ways to Integrate Offline and Online Marketing Strategies

1. Take the Offline Events Online

The events make up the offline strategies which can be in different forms. The events include fundraisers, parties, seminars, house parties, workshops amongst other events. Such events may be the centers of networking. You can even use such events to introduce a new product or to celebrate the company’s anniversary.

In case you are the one hosting the offline event, you can take it online by;

1. Making announcements about the event online.

2. Advertising it and promoting the event through emails and social media.

3. Creating invitations online using social media platforms like Eventbrite, Twitter and Facebook. Sending emails since direct mail invitations might not be enough.

Such platforms enable you to be informed about the number of people turning up for your event. They also enable you to inform the invitees, on the number of people that are registered and their names too. When the invites know the number of people attending your event, it gives them encouragement and they can even invite other people.

At the event, make use of the strategy of marketing at real time. You can even post a live picture or even a video to other social media platforms.

After the event has ended, create a new email or a Facebook post. Post it to your homepage to thank everybody who attended your event.  Incase your event was educational; you can even take into consideration hosting another webinar kind. This will help other people to learn deviously.

You can even stream the event live. You can also record the whole event and then share it on the social media platforms. From this you will get great results from real time marketing. You can refer to some social media marketing blogs to choose the best social media platform that will do the miracle for you.

Moving on.

2. Take the Offline Sales Online

One way to have people visiting your store is, using the in-store promotions. This also enhances personal interactions between you and the people who come to your store. However, is it good to only limit the promotions to the people that you know or those that are walking by your store? You should enlarge the reach of such promotions. How do you do this? By sharing the promotions online. You can do this by first creating an attractive name for the promotion then forming a hashtag from the name, to use it on Twitter and even Instagram. You can also have an image that is pleasing to the eyes, then convert it into a visual post.

Another way to take the offline sales online is by having in-store discounts which can be redeemed online.  For instance, you can offer the discount to 20 people who will like a certain photo you post first.

In addition, you can also have discounts that can only be retrieved using an activity, online. For instance, the discount can be offered to any customer who takes a picture while in your store and promote your store on their accounts on social media. They can even use a custom hashtag.

To get all the latest trends in hashtags you can prefer this website: hashtagify. They give you complete analysis of the trending hashtags, their popularity and searches.

3. You can take the Offline Trend Online

Some of the offline swags include branded caps, bags or even sweaters. Having people wear items that have been branded, helps to boost your business’ exposure. These people will advertise your business to everyone who sees them. You can then take this strategy online through posting pictures of those people in your branded items or even have them post their pictures on their social media accounts.

Other Marketing Ideas from Offline to Online

1. When a customer points out that they had a great experience, you can request them to do an online review. Customer reviews plays vital role in ORM: Online Reputation Management, a good ORM status always drive more potential customers for your service.

2. Make use of monitored phone lines to know, what materials are bringing the biggest number of calls and which are the materials bringing many conversions. This can only happen if you are using materials that have been printed.

3. In case you have had a great experience with a certain customer, you can share that experience on your newsletter.

How do you Bring Online Marketing Offline?

1. Promote your Social Media Offline

The easiest way you can do this is by, having reminders to remind people to follow the accounts you have and like your posts on materials that have been printed out such as flyers, banners, brochures or signs.

You can also make announcements on social media contests using printed materials. Postcards can also be used or a poster placed in your store to let people know about the contest, which can be held weekly or monthly. After the contest pronounce the winners and award them. However, makes sure you have their permission because they are people who do not like their pictures being printed out.

2. Use Newspapers and Magazines

You can ask a local newspaper if they would like to publish any of blog posts. You can even request to write anything they would want you to, using your own formatting styles. You blog posts could offer opportunities to take your efforts online to offline.

3. Print Your Own Online Content

You can do it yourself especially if you are a business owner who receives the same questions repeatedly. You can print the content into brochures, pamphlets or magnets.

At the end of the day, to get great results, you will have to incorporate both the offline and online marketing strategies. The integration of these two marketing strategies helps to boost your marketing. The same way we merge our other online and offline activities, should be same case with our business activities. You should combine both the offline promotions with the online marketing strategies of your business.

If you are looking forward to grow your business globally, keep your marketing strategy parallel with the digital marketing opportunities and traditional approach of marketing, they are no rocket science but a proper studied strategy can do the wonders to your business. 

AAbout the Author( Jasmeet Singh)

Jasmeet Singh is an Entrepreneur, Digital Marketing Strategist, and an active blogger. He is the
founder of The Sharp Brain, a Digital Marketing Training Institute located in India. He is an active Quoran and an avid reader.

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