Tanbir Singh asked:


Many Internet Marketers really miss out on opportunity to grow their list because they only market to individuals online. They feel that the internet is the only way for them to market their online business. That is completely not true. The offline world is alive and they are responsive. The mail order business was around before the internet and they are still around today thriving. So if you were to balance your online marketing and offline marketing you will find that you will generate more exposure then just using one or the other. For more details visit to www.mailing-list-gold.com .In my marketing I use simple methods to reach people who I know are candidates for my products that may not be looking for information online yet. They may not even know they want what I have until they see a print add or a business card. After viewing my ad then they may think to themselves “that sounds interesting Let me take a look”.

Marketing offline in this way can give you a jump on your competition because they may only be marketing online. They are missing the prospect that is not yet looking online. So when they see your ad you are the only person they know and they are apt to go to you first.

Another benefit to marketing offline is that some of your current list may not open their email. And if you have a special promotion or a service to offer they may not get to know about it unless you were to use a method of contacting them offline. Many smart marketers do this. For instance one list that I belonged to would send out a voice blast to my phone to remind me of a conference call they were sponsoring and they would leave the message on my voice mail. Now if they would have only sent an email I would not have received it or paid attention to it. So by sending out offline marketing they filled their phone lines and received more listeners then if they would have just emailed their list.

There are many cost effective ways of using offline marketing to build your list. The simplest that has the largest reach is to run tiny classified ads that will point people to how they can get more information either for free or at a cost. For more information logon to www.build-own-list.com .A second way you can and should direct people to your site is to always have business cards with a strong headline directing people to your site with a benefit of why they should go there.

Lets not forget the importance of signage I’ve placed signs that say “Need extra income? Free report tells how go to www.” The response I get from that is incredible.

The last way I will mention is the real estate on the back of your car. Even if you drive a Mercedes Benz a tactfully small website address will get peoples attention especially if the site tells a little of what it is about in the address.

Using these techniques will drive many offline individuals online sometimes just out of curiosity. Once there it is up to you to convert them through your sales page and or squeeze page.

Clearly offline marketing is not dead, you can reach a huge segment of subscribers by meeting them offline. If you do not make an effort to marketing both offline and online you are throwing away tons of prospective subscribers and possibly even more money.

So be creative and don’t neglect the benefit that off line marketing has on your List Building endeavors.

Tanbir asked:


Many Internet Marketers really miss out on opportunity to grow their list because they only market to individuals online. They feel that the internet is the only way for them to market their online business. That is completely not true. The offline world is alive and they are responsive. The mail order business was around before the internet and they are still around today thriving. So if you were to balance your online marketing and offline marketing you will find that you will generate more exposure then just using one or the other. For more details visit to www.mailing-list-gold.com .In my marketing I use simple methods to reach people who I know are candidates for my products that may not be looking for information online yet. They may not even know they want what I have until they see a print add or a business card. After viewing my ad then they may think to themselves “that sounds interesting Let me take a look”.

Marketing offline in this way can give you a jump on your competition because they may only be marketing online. They are missing the prospect that is not yet looking online. So when they see your ad you are the only person they know and they are apt to go to you first.

Another benefit to marketing offline is that some of your current list may not open their email. And if you have a special promotion or a service to offer they may not get to know about it unless you were to use a method of contacting them offline. Many smart marketers do this. For instance one list that I belonged to would send out a voice blast to my phone to remind me of a conference call they were sponsoring and they would leave the message on my voice mail. Now if they would have only sent an email I would not have received it or paid attention to it. So by sending out offline marketing they filled their phone lines and received more listeners then if they would have just emailed their list.

There are many cost effective ways of using offline marketing to build your list. The simplest that has the largest reach is to run tiny classified ads that will point people to how they can get more information either for free or at a cost. For more information logon to www.build-own-list.com .A second way you can and should direct people to your site is to always have business cards with a strong headline directing people to your site with a benefit of why they should go there.

Lets not forget the importance of signage I’ve placed signs that say “Need extra income? Free report tells how go to www.” The response I get from that is incredible.

The last way I will mention is the real estate on the back of your car. Even if you drive a Mercedes Benz a tactfully small website address will get peoples attention especially if the site tells a little of what it is about in the address.

Using these techniques will drive many offline individuals online sometimes just out of curiosity. Once there it is up to you to convert them through your sales page and or squeeze page.

Clearly offline marketing is not dead, you can reach a huge segment of subscribers by meeting them offline. If you do not make an effort to marketing both offline and online you are throwing away tons of prospective subscribers and possibly even more money.

So be creative and don’t neglect the benefit that off line marketing has on your List Building endeavors.

William King asked:


One of the most critical aspects of running a business is marketing. It encompasses every customer related task from creating awareness to customer satisfaction and retention. One may go as far as to say that a business cannot survive or even start up without it. In the current scenario, marketing has become a complex and sophisticated function, especially now that an increasing number of businesses choose to start up online. Now, along with the traditional offline marketing tools, there are a number of web marketing tools and methods available. These web marketing methods must be mastered for any level of success in online business.

The differences that separate web marketing from offline marketing are as below:

• Snail mail vs. email – Email marketing is low cost, efficient, instant and effective means of generating customers. Snail mail is slow, generally more expensive and is losing some of its efficacy with the influx of TV and Internet.

• Limited radius of impact vs. unlimited – The target audience is global in the case of web marketing with the Internet shrinking the world. The radius of offline marketing is limited by physical, political and time barriers.

• Web customers are looking for a product or service similar to yours – The beauty of being an online business is that people log on to look for a service or product that you can offer. Whereas, offline businesses have to rely more on push marketing than the pull effect.

• Long, complex process of making a sale vs. instant conversion – A few clicks of a mouse and the product is sold, in the case of web marketing. Offline marketing process is time and manpower heavy, from generating leads to making a sale.

• Fixed office hours vs. 24 hour store – An online business can sell its products 24 hours a day while an offline business will open and shut at particular hours.

• Advertising in print, TV and radio is expensive – While you can easily offer content, audio and video clips on the Internet for a very low cost.

• Pay for time spots vs. unlimited time and space – Ads in offline marketing mediums are for a limited time only and you pay for time slots and space. In an online marketing scenario, you would keep your ads up for a longer time and pay much less.

• Cost per incremental customer – This cost is very low for web marketing based concerns, whereas this cost is appreciable in case of offline marketing efforts.

• Targeted approach vs. blanket approach – The above reason leads offline marketing businesses to target and select carefully, eliminating a lot of potential customers, who may buy in the future if not the present. However, low incremental costs result in online businesses covering a broad spectrum of the market.

• Segmentation – Preferences are much easier to track for an online business and this means that segmentation is simpler. The web marketing effort has the information it needs to customize its pitch at once.

• Customer contact – Access to customer information is automatic in the case of online businesses and the web marketing process is simplified and made efficient. Databases and mailing lists are created in an instant. On the contrary, offline marketing efforts for the same require time, employees and money.

There are many benefits to both web marketing and offline marketing, and it is best to use a judicious mix of the two.

temp_168807 asked:

If you own and operate an online business, it would be quite myopic to exclusively focus on online marketing methods to promote your enterprise.  Granted that the World Wide Web is home to some amazing and cost-effective ways that can help spread the word about your business, the World Wide Web remains as just one avenue for you to exploit.  There is a more promising avenue that has been neglected since the advent of the internet.

 

This is the offline market.

 

Below are 5 simple but highly effective offline marketing methods that you can implement for your online business.

 

Distributing items that prominently display your URL.  Coffee mugs, caps, shirts, and even bumper stickers.  Surely, you’ve seen such items that displayed a particular URL, right?  Can you remember how intrigued you were when you encountered them?  Perhaps you may still remember the URL you saw back then?  Such is the power of this method.

 

Distributing media kits for the press people.  Press people are always on the lookout for things to write about.  Make things easy for them by distributing press kits that consist of: an expertly written press release about your company or about an event that affects your company, a profile of your business, a list of prominent clients/customers, a list of awards received, your complete product line, and other similar details.

 

Conducting seminars, symposiums and workshops.  What better way to promote your website – something that is often viewed with the negativity caused by the prevalent anonymity on the internet – than by providing the public with the face of your business: yours.  By making yourself visible and displaying your expertise in events that call for the same, such as seminars, symposiums and workshops related to the field you are concentrating on, you’ll be able to build your name in the industry, and consequently, you will be able to build the brand of your business.

 

Advertise in your dailies and magazines.  Yes, it will cost some money, but advertising on print publications is not as expensive as it may initially seem to most folks.  You don’t need full page ads or double-paged spreads.  You won’t even need a quarter of a page.  You will need an eighth of a page at the most.  Based on experience, the best type of print ad that you can run is a simple display of your website’s URL.  Imagine white font on black background and you’ll see how such an ad will stand out.  Because of the dearth in details, people will be intrigued and they will log online to check out your site to see what it’s about.

 

Sponsor charity events.  Most of these events will prominently display their sponsors’ logos on the advertising materials they will use.  Instead of your business’ logo, ask that your website’s URL be displayed instead.  The exposure your link will receive via this method can potentially be immense.  Imagine a charitable event on a national, if not a global, scale, and you will begin to imagine the sheer potency of this technique in action.

Jeff Casmer asked:

The Internet has become the largest medium of communication; and has presented a lot of business opportunities.

Online home based business owners tend to limit themselves to online marketing methods. Nevertheless, there is a huge potential to promote your home based business through some cost effective offline marketing strategies.

So what are the most effective offline marketing strategies for your home based business?

1. Word of mouth in your circle of influence Word of mouth is one of the best free advertising channels. We all have people we interact with on a daily basis, and these are potential customers. Make a list of all the people you know or interact with and how can you best tell them about your internet business. Be passionate about your internet business and always be prepared to tell someone about it when an opportunity to do so presents itself!

2. Mail-out newsletters and flyers Mail-out newsletter or flyers can be effective if you target it to a specific ‘group’. You could create one to distribute to local day care centers just as an example – and in your newsletter or flyer, highlight the benefits of an online business to the targeted group, for example earning money at home for stay at home moms or dads. Posting your home based business URL on bulletin boards can also be effective.

3. Use and give away free branded ‘stuff’ You can promote your business by having your URL on all your stationery, all written communication and other items you can give away for free. If you want to get a lot of people to know about your home based business, you will need to come up with some creative ways of promoting your URL. You can be limited only by your imagination. Have your business cards with your home based business URL. Give them out to people you meet, leave them about where you can, such as in your local coffee shop.

4. Newspapers and magazines Local newspapers are good for advertising your online business. Most local papers have ‘home business opportunities’ section, so you run a regular classified advert. In addition, contact your local newspaper or business-oriented magazine and let the business editor know you have a new business and web site and what you offer. Local newspapers are frequently interested in featuring local business people and their accomplishments. This is free advertising and should always be used. You can also contact your local magazine and offer to write a monthly or weekly guest column for them, and include your ‘author bio’ and home based business URL.

5. Joint ventures with offline business You can get into a joint venture partnership with an offline business which sells a complementary product or service to your home based business. If you can identify a partner that best fit your business, this is an important offline marketing strategy that can help you succeed in your home based business by enabling you to reach potential customers that you could not reach before. As an example, if you have a website selling fitness/health products or tips, you could prepare a leaflet and make a deal with an offline local fitness/health shop where they giveaway your leaflet to their shoppers with each purchase. The offline marketing strategies strategies outlined above can help you grow your home based business.

Adrian Bold asked:

Do you spend a considerable amount of your marketing budget on traditional offline marketing approaches such as radio, television and newspaper advertising? You could be significantly losing out.

Like it or not, the coming of Internet Marketing has sounded the death-knell for traditional methods of marketing and associated advertising. Newspapers are rapidly shedding staff; even the UK’s Channel 4 Television can no longer survive without merging with another channel due to the drop in advertising revenue it had previously relied upon.

So why is offline marketing dying off?

Compare the traditional direct mail marketing technique with online email marketing approaches. Take a sales letter and mail it out to 10,000 people. Add up the cost of stationery and postage, even with discounts for mass postage, you need a good budget. Now compose an email, add your database of 10,000 customers and email it directly to their inbox in less than 10 seconds. The cost is nothing and you essentially require no budget.

Furthermore, recent research indicates that direct mail only generates a 2% response rate; email marketing generates 5 times as much. Offline Marketing cannot compete with these results.

Is it a surprise that traditional offline marketing methods are dying off? Their share of the market shrinking, revenue receding as the online marketing sector grows and takes over the lion’s share of the market?

If we contrast the range of offline marketing, we easily reveal an important weakness in the traditional approach. Offline marketing is limited by geographic location. Newspaper circulation or television/radio broadcasting range limits the effectiveness of the offline marketing campaign. Online marketing campaigns are geographically limitless. If you wish, you can advertise your product or service to millions of people across the entire world.

Broadcast and print advertising has always been expensive, and in their dying days, they still won’t compete with the Internet on cost. Online marketing offers targeted marketing, rather than blanket marketing at a fraction of the cost.

That neatly brings us onto the ability to target your exact customer. Offline advertising can only attempt to do this by hoping enough men are watching football, or women are watching Desperate Housewives. With the online alternative, you can target the very customers that are already looking for your products or services. Again, offline marketing cannot compete with this level of accuracy in finding customers and bringing them to your website.

Using Internet Marketing rapidly reduces the time between a potential customer seeing your marketing and responding to it. Online marketing promotes immediate reaction, generating immediate revenue. Your customer sees your ad. The customer reads your ad, they like what they read, they check the price, and it’s good. They click to add the product to the shopping cart; they fill in their details and click to pay. Within three clicks or so, you’ve made a sale. Traditional marketing methods simply cannot produce these rapid results, or the volume of increased business that they are capable of producing.

Whilst some people will cling on to offline marketing, suspicious of the Internet’s success, their competitors using online marketing are increasing their sales by the hour.

Felix Burke asked:

Traditional marketing methods are still a viable resource to engage customers, and you can use them to drive buyers to your online products as well!

Traditional marketing includes newspapers, magazines, catalogues, fliers, direct mail, business cards, radio and TV ads, and specialty products, such as pens with your logo. These communications have been successful since the printing press, and now they can enhance your online marketing. Here’s how.

Think of each of the traditional communications as your pre-sell for your online presence. Imagine that you have a vitamin product, particularly helpful for eye health. Place an ad, perhaps in a health magazine, that extols the benefits of the product and sends the buyers to your pitch page online for testimonials and to purchase. You have just used traditional marketing-the magazine–to direct buyers to an online purchase.

Here’s another great example. Imagine you are a CPA in business for yourself, and you’ve recently joined the Chamber Of Commerce. Attending one of their “Business After Hours” functions, you give out several of your business cards, and point out that more information about your services is available at your website. When a prospect visits your website, all your accreditations, education, awards, community service, family profile, and available services are front and center. Your site is easily navigable, and with each click, you are building credibility with the visitor. Although your product is your service, and that is done in person, traditional marketing-your business card–drives people to your website to pre-sell them, and predispose them to select you for a CPA.

Here’s yet one more example, to get your marketing juices flowing. Imagine you run a small local bakery which specializes in ten different kinds of pralines, shipped all over the U.S. Twelve weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday, your brochures are sent to a large mailing list of former and prospective customers. Your brochure is beautifully appetizing, but it can’t hope to cover all the pertinent information for shipped orders, so customers are directed online. At your website, every kind of praline is pictured, and testimonials abound by satisfied customers from Maine to Oregon. You don’t take phone orders anymore, as every available worker is packing pralines, so all orders are done via the website. And how did your customers find you? Traditional marketing in the form of your brochure brought them to you.

Don’t abandon offline marketing in your online efforts, for you may well find that the sum of the two is mathematically even more profitable than either one alone!

Ihab asked:

The great thing about search engine marketing is its ability to attract a consumer who has already expressed interest in a service or product via a search engine term. The consumer’s curiosity is already whetted. It is up to the e-marketer to satisfy this curiosity.

Offline marketing campaigns set the preliminary grounds by exposing the consumer to its product or service through the print media, the television, the radio and billboards. These offline campaigns affect about 70 percent of your overall audience. The remaining 30 percent is that part of the market that can be reached effectively through online marketing.

Thus, in a way, your advertising strategies have to effectively cover offline as well as online marketing. Only by integrating your online campaigns with the offline ones can you expect your brand to have better recognition. The more aware your target market is about your product, the better chances you have of establishing their trust in your brand.

Today, building a stable relationship with your audience is made easier with online marketing methods like podcasts, search engines, social interaction platforms, corporate blogs, mobile e-mail alerts, company websites, etc. to name a few. This YouTube era prefers a more personalized approach and outlook to any virtual communication.

Formality is a passé word for this generation of consumers, though they prefer to be approached with a degree of professionalism. After all, if a seller has to stand out from, the multitude of competitors that are present online, he has to have the right mix of trust, user appeal and a professional approach to conducting business.

At Clear Media Online, our e-marketing professionals work with you to understand your advertising requirements. We are proficient in understanding your offline campaigns and work accordingly to integrate them with our online marketing methods.

Ben Curtis asked:


Traditional marketing methods are still a viable resource to engage customers, and you can use them to drive buyers to your online products as well!

Traditional marketing includes newspapers, magazines, catalogues, fliers, direct mail, business cards, radio and TV ads, and specialty products, such as pens with your logo.  These communications have been successful since the printing press, and now they can enhance your online marketing.   Here’s how.

Think of each of the traditional communications as your pre-sell for your online presence.  Imagine that you have a vitamin product, particularly helpful for eye health.  Place an ad, perhaps in a health magazine,  that extols the benefits of the product and sends the buyers to your pitch page online for testimonials and to purchase.  You have just used traditional marketing—the magazine– to direct buyers to an online purchase.

Here’s another great example.  Imagine you are a CPA in business for yourself, and you’ve recently joined the Chamber Of Commerce.  Attending one of their “Business After Hours” functions, you give out several of your business cards, and point out that more information about your services is available at your website.  When a prospect visits your website, all your accreditations, education, awards, community service, family profile, and available services are front and center.  Your site is easily navigable, and with each click, you are building credibility with the visitor.  Although your product is your service, and that is done in person, traditional marketing—your business card– drives people to your website to pre-sell them, and predispose them to select you for a CPA.

Here’s yet one more example, to get your marketing juices flowing.   Imagine you run a small local bakery which specializes in ten different kinds of pralines, shipped all over the U.S.   Twelve weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday, your brochures are sent to a large mailing list of former and prospective customers.  Your brochure is beautifully appetizing, but it can’t hope to cover all the pertinent information for shipped orders, so customers are directed online.   At your website, every kind of praline is pictured, and testimonials abound by satisfied customers from Maine to Oregon.   You don’t take phone orders anymore, as every available worker is packing pralines, so all orders are done via the website.   And how did your customers find you?  Traditional marketing in the form of your brochure brought them to you.

Don’t abandon offline marketing in your online efforts, for you may well find that the sum of the two is mathematically even more profitable than either one alone!

Javed asked:


People spend lots of money on promoting their products on revolutionary online ways like Google Adwords, Articles, Forums etc., but they skip the whole idea of going back to Grassroots marketing, where its the cheapest of the marketing methods and no one else is doing it any more, because everyone is trying to jump on these new bandwagons to promote their products and its just awful because you can spend so much money trying to promote in Google Adwords and places where its paid Advertising. You are not going to make much money in return because so many others are promoting there.

The items like BUsiness Cards, Rubber Stamps, Magnets, Post Cards, Window Decals, lawn Signs, Pens are very unique tools for offline marketing. You think about these  items and you are probably wondering where you you are going to get Rubber Stamps or Magnets or Lawn Signs or Pens created and how you going to do it so cheap? Well there is a place out there called vistaPrint.com and if you go to this site you can see an area called free products,where you can have free Business cards Made, Free Rubber Stamps created, Free Logo Design and there is far more things that you can get like Car Door Magnets.

You can go to the Marketing materials area on this site, where you have items like Postcards, Brochures, Flyers, Post Card Marketing, Magnets, T-SHirts, pens and the list goes on & on & on. There is an are called Signage where you have the Car Door Magnets, Window Decals, Lawn Signs and you can see if you ever remember driving down the road you might have seen a Lawn Sign, and VistaPrint.com is the place where you can get it made very cheap.

If you are doing any kind of marketing in Google Adwords you are paying like a Dollar a click or 50 Cents a click you are only going to get a hand full of clicks coming to a website, when you can  spend the same amount of money and get a Lawn Sign and go put it on a major road in your local neighbourhood or in your local city to get you product advertised and get out of the ratrace that every one is into and jumpig back to the Grassroots where a ton of Money is to be made with a very minimal effort.

Now you know where you can get the above mentioned 7 different types for marketing tools or strategies created. Then you you have to know where you are going to put this kind of stuff, where are you going to get people to buy your products through these items. Well I put together a list of places for you.

So What are the places?

Bathrooms

Work

Windshields

Salons

Bookstore

Parks

Bandit Signs

Parties

Health Clubs

Dance Classes

Seminars

Political Events

Spas

Book clubs

Libraries

Antique Shops

The Mall

Parent Organisation

PLay Grouds

Self-Help Groups

Laundromats

Colleges

Coffee Shops

Theatres

Beaches

Pools

Vacation Areas

Destinations

Bowling

Bus Stops

Airports

Singe Meetings

Checkouts

Bars

Neighbourhood

This is totally off the wall and the reason is because there is nobody else is promoting any other products in these areas.For example bathrooms, imagine if you are a guy going to a bathroom and there is those areas on top of the urinal where you can set your keys,wallets or drinks, imagine having a business card describing your product on the stand so that they pickup and put in their pocket and it has you website address or contact address which they can go through when they go home.

That is the difference from promoting products is Grassroots Marketing like this and promoting in cutting edge technologie like Adwords where you are going to spend a fortune trying to get that one customer to pickup card and go check out your website.

If you have a full time Job, you probably have tens of hundreds of coworkers or colleagues wiht whom you go to lunch or Happyhours or you go  to breakfast, if you are working with people whom you know one on one basis. Imagine if you have the materials like Business Cards or Post Cards or Magnets or Pens with your website address printed on them which you can give to your co workers. So they actually come to your website and buy your product.

Do you have a Mall or Big Shopping Store nearby where there is hundreds of cars in a parking lot, well with windshields you can create these little Business Cards or Drop Cards which doesn’t have your name, telephone number or address on it but its just a white or red or black card with just text headline describing your product folowed by your  website address. You can create Drop Cards on the same VistaPrint.com and just put the cards on the windshields.

You can leave your marketing stuff in bookstores or cofee shops or parks where hundreds of persons can get to know about your product with the help of these marketing tools. Lawn signs are “The” most effective in marketing becaouse they can be put where there is just a ton of people everyday. Parties, seminars are places where you talk to a lot of people on a one on basis, you  can put a Bandit Sign or Lawn Sign right there at the parking lot. And you can drop your cards around where ever the seminar is like where the lounge is where they hang out, thats an incredible place to promote.

There are tens of thousands of people in college you can promote through Flyers, and there just tons of cars parked at theatres, beaches, vacation areas, Airports wher you can actually drop your stuff around there. These are the other conventional marketing strategies aprt from the online markting techniques. if you can follow any of the above mentioned strategies, you can beat he heavy competition going on around in the online marketing techniques.