How to Integrate Offline and Online Marketing in Your Business 

When building your business plan, it’s important to look at all sides of your marketing strategies and make sure they are consistent, clear, and effective. We all know that online is the “go-to” method for many business. However, it is known there are many reasons why offline marketing is still important. Offline marketing strategies can help you reach customers that are not only and can help strengthen your business’ branding across both mediums.

Many people think of offline marketing and online marketing as two different, competing strategies. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, offline and online marketing are two different sides of the same coin. They can complement each other and, when integrated correctly, can boost your business in dynamic ways.

Think of them as a team where all players need the same focus but different roles.  It’s also important that the different players (offline and online marketing pieces) bring the customer together to one point of contact (either your website, your store, or both). Let’s take a more detailed look into some of the best ways to integrate your offline and online marketing. 

Use a Consistent Branding Across Both Platforms

Fancy logos are pretty, but if your customer can’t read them it won’t lead them to your store. Keeping up with trends is important, but constantly changing your logo or style of ads will leave people confused and unable to recognize your brand. 

One of the strongest assets your business has is your brand recognition. Keep branding simple, easy to read, eye-catching, and consistent across all points in your marketing. If you have a teal logo on your website and a royal blue logo on your storefront, customers won’t be able to tie the two together. Even if the name of your brand is the same on both. 

Getting your customer to connect the brand logo they saw online to the sign on the front of your store is the overall goal. 

Offer Physical Coupons for Online Purchases

Another way to integrate online and offline marketing is to use physical coupons. Have you ever gone through your mail and found a coupon for a store you have shopped previously? Maybe you weren’t planning to purchase anything there in the near future, but now that you have a coupon in hand, you begin thinking about what you could purchase. 

Using offline strategies such as mailing coupons is a great way to get customers’ attention. You can also have them available at your storefront to help encourage your customers to purchases online. This strategy helps your customers make purchases online and offline.

Use Tracking URLs and Unique Landing Pages

When sending out flyers, emails, text messages, posting on billboards, investing in newspaper or magazine ads, and other types of marketing it’s vital to be able to track where you are seeing the most return for your specific customer base. 

There are a few different ways to complete this strategy. You can create pages that are specifically set up for certain promotions or special offers and track exactly how much traffic you get to the site. You can also have different URLs set up for specific types of ads such as a giveaway, just as long as it doesn’t take people directly to your main homepage, as those numbers are impossible to track exactly why someone clicked on the page. 

With the ability to know exactly how many people visited a specific URL based on a certain marketing scheme helps you to build your strategy going forward and trash some components that you didn’t find to be effective. 

Develop a Mobile App

Developing a mobile app as a part of your business plan can be highly effective but can also be very expensive and not an avenue you want to skimp on. Apps are useful tools as they give you direct access to your customer and can even give you the ability to notify them anytime you run a special event or promotion. 

Apps are an extensive and highly-technical part of your marketing strategy. Investing in a great development and caretaker team will help you to get the most downloads as well as satisfied users. Nobody wants an app taking up space on their phone that is glitchy or ineffective. 

Promote In-Person Events Online

With the ability to reach a broader audience online, it’s good to take advantage of that reach and work on getting customers inside your store.

A great way to implement this into your marketing strategy would include creating events on your social media pages, such as Facebook and get customers excited for upcoming promotions or specials. With people being able to mark statuses such as “going” or “interested”, it can promote the event even past your promotion as their friends will see these update. 

You can also create a hashtag for specific events as well as your brand name and encourage customers to use it when they are using your products or if they will be attending an event. Making a specific hashtag for the event and pairing it with your brand name will help potential customers tie your business together with fun events and hopefully interest them enough to show up themselves. 

Conclusion

Remember that your online and offline marketing strategies are not competing against each other. Instead, they are teammates working together to enhance the overall effectiveness of all pieces to benefit your business. Do not cut one piece out without looking first to see how its role played into the end goals.

Use your stars and supporting “players” to create an efficient and effective marketing strategy that ties offline and online marketing together for the overall good of the business. 

Katie Budd

Team Writer: Katie Budd is a full-time 8-5er in the commercial insurance industry and works on building her freelance writing business. She enjoys creating engaging content for people to read. She also enjoys working out at home doing Street Parking programming, encouraging her kids to chase what they are passionate about, and spending as much time on the farm with her extended family as possible. Follow along with her on her blog and Instagram as she continues to put thoughts into words.