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.

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.

Article Submitter asked:


If Business is to profit, then Marketing is to business. Since, without marketing, business is not possible whether it is done in any form. Even traditional business had some marketing tactics, be it delivery unto buyer place or flexibility in payment terms. Ultimately, what can turn on more business is often considered as marketing and its implementation after analysis of the situations from time to time can be termed as strategy. I often found, when you say strategy, people nod their head but when it comes to know what is strategy they loose the color of their face.

Strategy is a factor which construes marketing and marketing runs on strategy. What RCC beams are to a building  in the same manner strategy is for marketing .if one claims to be doing marketing without strategy then he may be fooling himself and more to others as without strategy in any manner , marketing is not possible.

The very next thing which comes is how to make strategies for marketing the product?

Before that, let us take some pain to understand what exactly is strategy. Strategy is nothing but understanding the basics of positioning a product, features and potential of product, strength and weakness of products, timely review of planning’s etc and then analyzing it to conclude with some parameters for selling the same product with respect to different zones and geographical areas, this result into strategy. Isn’t it very simple. If one makes simple strategy, he makes simple way to success in business.

After Strategy, What Next?

Then comes the real marketing play. Again, it is followed by another question how to and what can be the modes of marketing.

Lets us see which mode is required, when marketing modes option comes to be chosen for business:

Whether Online Marketing?

Whether Offline Marketing?

Before, discussing about advantages and dis-advantages as well as requirement of online marketing, let’s see the modes and strategies of offline marketing.

a. Direct Marketing

b. Telemarketing

c. Advertisement in TV

d. Campaign based advertisement in Radio.

e. Advertisement in public places, public transportation

f. Participation in Exhibitions & Trade Shows

g. Door to Door Marketing

h. Promotional campaigns

i. Discounts and offers

j. Referral Marketing

k. Public Relations

l. Print Media

M. sponsoring some events, sports etc.

The list can have much more to it, but the aforesaid are considered to be the prominent amongst any other options possible or available for any person.

So, after doing, still one requires any other mode of marketing, before we make a hasty decision, what if some online marketing options are just explored:

a. Contacting and Responding through Mail

B. Advertisement in Google, Yahoo

C. Advertisement through Ad brite

D. Advertisement in Blogs

E. Advertisement in most popular sites and portals

f. Article Marketing

g. Affiliate Marketing

h. Online Viral Marketing

i. Email Marketing

j. Activities in Forum & Social bookmarking

K. Linking with quality sites

l. Banner Exchange

m. Search Engine Optimization via Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Many more to be added, even in this sphere alone.

After referring to all, do you feel one is required and sufficient and if one is, then which one .Then I must answer that absolutely NOT, one cannot be a substitute for other, but both are required.

Because, Offline, marketing is very well known potential mode of marketing and will always be required but at the same only offline marketing will not do justice to your marketing, still don’t believe, then just check the truth as stated below:

a) Round the globe more than 50% business is carried out and communicated through mails which is online mode.

b) Corporates, SMEs, MNC all are dependant upon mail for communication.

c) Young generation is net savvy.

d) People are dependant upon websites to fulfill their basic necessities be it

1) jobs, 

2) accommodation,

3) buying and  selling

4) marriage

5) chatting

6) communication

7) outsourcing work

filing tax returns

9) gathering any information etc

10) on an average more than 50% business man and involved in international trade use B2b Portals to effect the business .

If this is the some eye opening facts , can still one keep away from online marketing ………….Now You Decide !

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.