Marketing campaigns can incorporate a wide variety of mediums to both reach as large an audience as possible and to reinforce the marketing or brand message. However the most successful of marketing strategies harness a range of methods that merge the offline world with the online, driving customers through to social media presences, websites or other online destination as they iteratively move them through a well refined sales funnel.
Here we take a look at exactly how these two once separate realms of marketing can be merged, providing real world examples of how you can strengthen your next marketing campaign.
1. Remember to invite your consumers from offline over to online.
All of your offline marketing materials should include references to the presences that you have online. This includes your email address, website address, and social media accounts.
2. Be aware of the capabilities of technology, and be quick to leverage them.
Technology is always advancing, and along with it are opportunities for harnessing all that it can offer. A recent example of which would be augmented reality, where companies ranging from sofa stores to bathroom fitters are allowing consumers to bring their offline home spaces online by uploading images where they can then place the company’s products within their homes digitally – pretty impressive, eh?
3. Understand that direct mail is the unsung hero of the modern marketing world.
Direct mail is well on its way to truly shedding its junk mail title, at least for clever marketers who appreciate this medium for all that it can offer (or rather what the technology that can be coupled with direct mail materials can provide). This medium is serving to drive up to 92 percent of receivers onto some form of line activity, and is leading to 54 percent taking some type of action upon social media. With impressive stats such as this, it seems that the world is your oyster when you understand the power of direct mail and why it’s becoming popular again.
Some other ways of merging the offline and online marketing realms through direct mail:
- Include QR codes on all of your printed marketing materials (not just those that are included within your direct mail).
- Provide discount coupons that can be used online as an incentive to visit your online world.
- Tell them all about that must know insider information that is available through your social media channel.
- Research indicated that 79 percent of consumers react to direct mail immediately. However, campaigns which integrate direct mail with other communication channels are even more successful.
4. Consider creating dedicated landing pages for various consumers.
Driving consumers from the offline world over to the online one can be made all the more effective, with higher conversion rates, if you consider creating landing pages that are dedicated to certain offline materials. So those who may have requested printed product information can be provided with a QR code that leads to a website page that uses all of the good practices of a landing page. This would then ensure that whether they’re ready to buy, or just ready to take another step in their process (such as signing up for a trial) there will be an option there for them, right before their eyes and all on the same page.
5. Make purchasing your services or goods easy – create an app for that.
Applications that live on your consumers’ phones are invaluable for breaking down the sales funnel barriers between initial consumer interest and a full-fledged purchase.
However, such applications must do one other thing in addition to selling your products and services, and that is to provide a valuable function to your consumer. This may be to track diet efforts (if you’re within the healthy food sector) or it may be to provide analysis of monthly budgets (if you’re within the financial sector).
6. Have physical locations? Make the most of merging offline with online.
If you benefit from physical locations where your consumers visit you (such as a retail store) then you should maximize their visit through innovative methods of routing them onto your online realms.
Let’s then take a few examples of how this can be done…
- Through augmented reality.
- Via one click or scan in-store products through to your social media mediums (such as allowing people to like, pin or follow your brands or products through in store displays and QR codes).
- In-store discounts in exchange for a status update, check in, follow or like.
- Through setting up a Google Plus page – essential for consumers who use their Smartphone to navigate to a store via their in-built GPS.
