Brynn A asked:


Many industrial and B2B companies are taking steps to add or enhance online marketing. Online marketing encompasses search engine optimization, article marketing, blogging and other Internet activity. As companies branch into the digital marketing world, it is key to evaluate current marketing initiatives and ensure that they blend with any new online marketing tactics. In fact, some online and offline marketing can work together for an added boost.

To align your marketing efforts, it is important that they follow a similar path and message. Your online marketing campaign is now as important, if not more important than your offline marketing. So, the message you send online should be planned and considered as thoroughly as the campaigns you already have in effect.

To make your digital promotion correspond well to your traditional marketing, you should ask a few questions:

1. What is your message? What are you promising? Is your website offering the answer to your message, does it guarantee to fulfill your promise?

2. Do your traditional marketing pieces have your web address place prominently on them?

3. Do both your online marketing & traditional marketing efforts provide a number, email or different ways to create action and convert customers?

To understand the importance of aligning marketing campaigns, realize that a potential client will always look to gain more knowledge before purchasing. After promotion of any type is seen, a client will do further research, if the advertisement captured their attention. One of the best ways to catch consumers is to educate them during their research stage. Providing a web address within offline marketing materials like business cards, sales books and trade show booths helps to further the “conversation” from paper to computer. Providing a web address is a powerful marketing tool, as it is not overly aggressive, yet provides you with another opportunity to catch their information like name, number and email address.

So, as you begin to flow your customers from your offline marketing to your industrial online marketing landing space, create your website to be a one stop information shop about your company, the products or services you provide, what you have given to the community and what others have to say about you. You can help a potential client have a positive impression before they even pick up the telephone or submit an online inquiry.

Every so often it is important to step back and think about how you proceed as a consumer. What actions do you take? What information are you looking for? Ask those in your company those questions and brainstorm about your ideal consumer’s buying process. It will likely include offline and online marketing channels, and a migration between the two. That is why it is important to have online and offline marketing emphasize the same message, and to have the two channels complement one another. You will be pleased with how powerful your marketing can be as the leads increase.

Chris Burns asked:


There are probably more than one hundred principles of direct marketing, ferreted down from marketing gurus and internet marketing experts all over the world. Different sorts of experiences lead to different conclusions, and inevitably, different advice. This article is designed to tell you there is a difference between advice and principle, whereas advice may be applied to isolated incidents and regions, the latter can be transposed into almost any situation of direct marketing. I have siphoned away 3, not because they are the best, but because they can be universally applied – so wait no longer, read on land earn direct marketing principles that work.

I will start in reverse order of importance. The first (or the last one for those that have been paying attention), is the copy. Be it fax, mail, internet or offline marketing, what you write is essentially the difference that either helps you close a deal or remain wondering what happened. Compelling copy can be considered to be the life blood of your direct marketing efforts. If you are not talking to them on the phone or shaking their hand in real life, what they read from you must be good enough to influence a purchasing decision. Remember, you are already at a disadvantage – you can’t see their reactions or hear their worries first hand. A mailer or brochure can’t talk back so you have to seal the deal the minute they read the first few lines.

The copy must be simple – you may be marketing to the lowest common denominator, so Shakespearean prose has no place in sales copy. It must be from the heart and sincere, use real life experiences and testimonials to breathe life to the product. The copy must keep a single question in mind – the ‘what’s in it for the consumer?’ The offer must be IRRESISTABLE, so concentrate on how you word your offer, write and rewrite and read it to yourself, over and over again until it’s just right.

Secondly, whatever you do, ensure that what you put out there must have what marketers call ‘an action device’. This can be a reply cut-out, an order form or even a point of contact. Make it easy for them to initiate a response, don’t leave them to guess where and who. Look at sales copy for websites, there is always almost a link somewhere at the end of the website. Point them in the right direction – closer and closer to buying the product.

This is the last and most important point. You may have the best, most sellable copy in the world. You could be selling a fantastic product. Your carrier could be striking, a design fit for the Louvre. But sent to the wrong market, all this would be pointless. The contacts that you have built up or have acquired must be highly detailed and highly targeted. This means that each and every name will be much more likely to consider the product – ‘needs identification’ can only occur through a high quality list. It is of crucial importance to match the product to the prospect, eliminating as much doubt as possible from the purchasing decision.

So now that you have learn direct marketing principles that work, you can apply it to any situation, for any product and for any market you wish to enter!

temp_168807 asked:

Don’t confine yourself to the online world.  Expand your horizons!  Think outside of the box!  Advertise your online business in the real world!

 

Go offline!

 

How many times have you heard veteran internet marketers mutter those suggestions?  They are, in fact, correct in their assessment.  Though there are 50 million people online at any given time, the fact remains that the internet only has a 37% *********** rate, meaning, the World Wide Web remains a big mystery to majority of the people in the planet.

 

Simply put, the internet may seem like a big place, but it is quite miniscule compared to the offline world.  The offline audience is a hungrier market that has yet to become numb to the marketing tactics of online businessmen.  They are likelier to provide a higher conversion rate for your online business.

When marketing offline, your efforts should take heed of these 3 very critical points:

 

You must realize that the entire world is not your audience.  Just because there are 6.5 billion people on Earth doesn’t mean each and every one of them is a potential customer.  The product or service you are planning to sell definitely targets a particular market.  Pinpoint that market so that your marketing efforts will focus on the same.  Advertising to a broad audience is much akin to blind marketing, producing poor results with wayward efforts and wasted resources.

 

You must be able to determine where you can find the members of your target audience.  Once you have pinpointed your target audience, you must do some research to know where to find them.  This will help you pinpoint advertisement avenues that will provide the most visibility for your offline marketing campaign.  Narrowing down the focus of your marketing efforts will also keep your advertising costs more manageable.  It’s useless advertising in a nationally circulated newspaper, for example, when you’re just targeting residents in the greater Los Angeles area.  The former will be needlessly more expensive.

 

You must be able to find sufficient motivation for people to go online and check out your website.  Most of the people you will be able to reach aren’t well versed when it comes to the internet.  They may be familiar with the basics, but the fact that you have failed to reach them online means that they spend most of their time in the real world.  The challenge that confronts offline marketers, hence, is this: how can they motivate people to go online to check out their websites?  Provide an engaging, if not exciting, catch with your offline ads.  Sponsor a contest.  Promise some freebies.  Make some guarantees.  Do what you must to win their attention, their interest, and their conviction to actually boot up their PCs and log online to check out your business.

BizAtomic asked:


This month’s articles hammer home the importance of synergy and consistency between your online and offline marketing efforts. Within this context this month tip addresses what may well be the most important and overriding marketing consideration you can make, online or offline—- Developing your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

When companies are trying to determine how to market a product, they focus on the Unique Selling Proposition, the one thing that makes that product different than any other. It’s the one reason they think consumers will buy the product even though it may seem no different from many others just like it. It may be that the product has a lower price or more convenient packaging, or it may taste or smell better, or last longer. Would you buy from a company that does not promise some great value, benefit, or service but just a “buy from us” for no good reason sales pitch?

Your unique selling proposition is the mantra around which you will build your success so you need to be able to state it in a single statement. It will discipline you to focus on what your business is all about and bring your company to mind when someone is looking for the products or services you sell. It answers the question every consumer asks “What’s in it for me”?

Many businesses online and offline don’t provide an answer – and very few online businesses make sure that answer appears on their landing and home pages. If you can’t cut through the clutter, grab attention and communicate immediately that you offer value nobody else has, your visitors are gone to someone who can.

In order to create your USP ask yourself the following questions:

1. What are the unique aspects about my business, product, or service vs my competition?

2. Which of these aspects are most important to my customers?

3. Which aspects are difficult for my competition to imitate?

4. Which of these aspects can be easily communicated and understood?

5. Can you create a memorable message (USP) of these unique, meaningful qualities about your business or brand?

6. How will you communicate this message (USP) to buyers and end users, both online and offline?

Examples:

AVIS: “We Try Harder”

Burger King: “Have it your Way”

Kentucy Fried Chicken: “Finger Lickin Good”

Dominos Pizza: “Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed”

Alicia Forest asked:


Taking my struggling consulting business online and following the business model I now do turned everything around for me, financially and otherwise. So when I started hearing from my mentors that I might want to add some offline marketing tactics back into the mix, I was hesitant to say the least.

But then I started studying and learning more about some specific direct mail strategies, and recognizing the power they have, I started wondering in maybe I wasn’t missing an important piece of the puzzle to take my business up another notch.

Then I started seeing some amazing results from my colleagues who were using direct mail in addition to their online marketing efforts – things as simple as a postcard – and I decided I needed to get into this game myself. (I’ll keep you posted on my own results in a future article.)

How do you get started adding direct mail marketing to your mix? Here are 5 simple steps:

1. Start collecting physical addresses

You may have the addresses of those clients and customers who have purchased from you already, which is a great start. But you also want to start collecting snail mail addresses from those people who sign up for your list. This way, when you’re ready to send a physical mailing out, you’ll have all the information you need. AND, as email deliverability gets muddier, you’ll always have this other option of reaching your audience.

2. Plan a campaign

I always tell my clients to plan an online promotion campaign when they are ready to market a specific product, program or service, instead of sending out a single announcement. The campaign I recommend typically includes a minimum of three emails.

Same goes for an offline mailing. You need to plan a campaign, with more than one mailing, in order to truly get and discern a return on your investment.

3. Go cheap the first time

Something I learned when I was the PR director for a university was NOT to do an expensive mailing until we had cleaned our list. Peoples’ addresses change for a variety of reasons and you may not always have the most up-to-date ones when you’re ready to send your mailing.

So, here’s a tip to clean your list before you start investing in some higher-end mailers. Send a postcard that has your return address on it to your current list. Then update your list via the returned postcards you get. Then make sure you have your return address on every mailing you do to keep your list as up-to-date as possible.

4. Keep it simple

Do a postcard, which gets read right away, with a simple, direct, compelling message and an immediate call to action, with graphics that don’t distract but support your message.

5. Track your mailings

The easiest way to do this is to send your readers to a simple website address (URL) that you only use for the purposes of that mailing. All you have to do is redirect that URL to your existing web page (where your offer resides) using the tracking link feature in your shopping cart. That way you can tell how many people typed in the URL and how many people took advantage of your offer. This is how you measure your return on your investment.

Getting started with adding direct mail to your marketing mix isn’t difficult. And by combining your online strategies with offline ones, you’ll be gaining a lot more clients and customers and bringing in a lot more income.

Victor Dawson asked:


Right from the time the Internet stepped into our lives, online marketing has been bandied around as a magic mantra– the wonder key to fortune. And all for good reason. An array of websites, ranging from magazines to live theatre performances are available to an audience ranging across a variety of profiles on the information superhighway.

But you have got to realize this-people and firms who have actually earned a fortune, a killing quickly (I won’t say overnight), have relied not only on online marketing efforts but also on their offline promotions. In fact, it ’s strange but true– many of them do not have an online presence at all.

Websites are springing up on the world wide web every moment of our existence. There are businesses and money-making programs at evry other nook and corner– millions of web addresses are competing for the attention of the eyeballs. Indeed, it is a plus, it definitely helps if your business is on the Net.

The Internet has brought in several turnkey methods into the way we go about operating our businesses. There are many who are yearning to have their place, their corner, on the Internet. But they do not know how to break into the huge net. They are waiting for someone to guide them by the hand. Reach out to this audience.

And once you resolve to tap this goldmine of a market, remember– You are preparing to bypass all that fierce competition on the Internet flashing a plethora of businesses, each one being as good or as bad as the other!

So, remember- those business flyers, postcards and letters may sound a bit old-fashioned, but ineffective they certainly are not. For the ads on paper get an attention that is comparatively less divided, as compared to those on the Internet, wherein you have ads rushing in from all sides.