What is Offline-to-Online Marketing?

A huge mistake I see businesses make is a failure to connect their offline marketing to their online marketing. What do I mean by that?  It will be easier to explain when I give you this example of a postcard I received in the mail a couple days ago.

I received a postcard mailing from a senior care facility.  I presume it’s because I am in my early fifties and the assumption is that I have aging parents, which I do. So I am on some kind of list of prospects to eventually be shopping for a senior care facility for a parent. This makes a lot of sense. What does not make sense is that this postcard had only a phone number and the names of 2 contact people and did not have the company website on the card at all.

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What’s the trouble with this? A website is there to do the heavy lifting a small postcard cannot do. A website has unlimited space to go into unlimited detail about the place, the product, the people, the features, and the benefits.

offline to online marketing techniques

Look at the ads in most print publications. They seldom use Landing Pages and this is an epic mistake.

The biggest failure of this and the bigger lesson as it relates to offline to online marketing is that there is no attempt to capture someone’s contact information who may be interested but not ready to make a decision right now. I would venture to say that would be the majority of people receiving the postcard. The solution to this failure would have been to have the website address of the organization and a special page on the website which is specifically created to work in tandem with the postcard. It would look something like this: www.oldageplace.com/freereport. This is called a LANDING PAGE.

 

The postcard should have offered a free report or some helpful tips which could be delivered by email if the recipient would simply fill out an online form. The free report could have been any among an infinite number of topics, such as “7 things you must ask when interviewing a senior care home.” Or, “21 nutrition tips for people over the age of 70. Or, “How to senior proof your home to prevent catastrophic injuries.”

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With a couple hours or so of work, this lead generating procedure could possibly create  dozens or even hundreds of those postcards which were probably sent out to thousands of people into solid leads. Anyone choosing to download these free reports would be an obvious prospect. With this list of their names and email addresses they could be on a list to receive information and reminders indefinitely. It’s what you call a highly-targeted list. The postcard mailing is fairly-well targeted, however, it’s a one-shot deal. It’ll be in the waste basket except for the tiny percentage for which it may be exactly the right thing at the right time.

When you send an email to the people who requested a free report once a month with a single idea or tip for caring for their elders, this organization would be always in top of mind position and also be regarded highly because of their expertise and quality information. Even further the law of reciprocity could become involved considering the good value this company provided prior to ever collecting a single dollar.

I see business is all the time advertising in print an expensive magazines. In Philadelphia there is Philadelphia Magazine. In South Jersey, there is SJ magazine.  These are the magazines which I see because I live in South Jersey. I’m sure there are major magazines in most metropolitan areas. Ads in these types of magazines are expensive. Yet I see most of the ads lack in advertising a landing page. Most businesses have the presence of mind to at least put their website address in their ad but actually that’s not good enough. It a landing page is much more effective than just sending someone to your home page.

Any restaurant, law firm, dentist, spa, massage therapist, chiropractor…ANYBODY who has a website and is not leveraging the power of a landing page to capture contact information of their ideal clients is only using their website as a glorified business card. When you take your customer from print ad to website, to requesting information, you are essentially taking their hand and walking them to your cash register.

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About the Author Andrew Mazer

Andrew Mazer, Founder of Mazer Wholesale, Inc. established since 1986. In 1996, I began marketing my wholesale business online. In 2009, I began helping other business owners market THEIR business online. I am the author of The Business Owner's Guide to Marketing Online, The Groupon Solution, and The One Good Idea Newsletter. Contact me at Andrew@smallbusinessu.org

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