When it comes to marketing your website, don’t assume that digital marketing is the only way. Online methods have tremendous value but so do traditional offline methods of marketing.
If you want to maximize website exposure, you need to combine your traditional and digital marketing efforts and find a happy medium.
As a marketer, you have to walk a fine line between staying grounded and adapting to the trends. While the same basic tactics of marketing that were relevant 20, 30, and 40 years ago still hold true, the ways in which brands target customers have changed.
As marketers, we’re all focused on effectively representing our brand in front of the right target market and persuading individuals to move from interest to action. How we accomplish this goal, however, can vary and is largely the result of an influx of tools and options.
In 2016, there’s a constant struggle between pre-Internet tactics and modern online techniques. Unfortunately, few marketers do an efficient job of balancing these two categories.
“Many marketers are overwhelmed and feel pressure to resist change, continuing to use traditional offline marketing tactics, while others wholeheartedly embrace online marketing, leaving offline strategies in the dust,” says marketer Rick Egan. “Neither path is truly optimal.”
Driving traffic to a website is challenging, and as you know, requires a concerted effort on all fronts, including offline marketing.
Let’s take a look at some blended strategies for combining traditional offline marketing with digital online marketing to increase website exposure.
When you think about direct mailers, what comes to mind? Do you think about an outdated marketing tactic that’s now overshadowed by the internet? Do you feel it’s only effective with a very specific demographic? Well, both of these assumptions would be wrong. Direct mail – when properly implemented alongside other digital solutions – is still extremely high-returning.
In 2015, Valpak – the undisputed leader in direct mail – sent out nearly 462 million envelopes to more than 37 million unique address in North America. This alone should reassure you that direct mail is still relevant.
The key to being successful with direct mailers in the digital age is using them to push traffic online. Businesses frequently use mailers to send out deals that require recipients to access the website in order to claim. For example, you could send out a deal that says, “Visit our website and enter the code SAVINGS to receive a 15 percent discount on your next online purchase.”
Direct mailers are extremely cost effective and can help you target people who may not be exposed to online marketing messages. Under the right circumstances, this can greatly increase site traffic and conversions.
Sometimes marketers want to leverage online traffic to increase offline traffic to brick and mortar locations or events. One of the preferred methods is to implement a local SEO strategy.
With local SEO, you can target very specific demographics by using highly optimized keywords, individual pages for dedicated locations, Google My Business local listings, NAP citations on various directories, and more. While it’ll take time to drive online traffic to offline destinations, a steady investment will yield strong results.
Brands with large marketing and advertising budgets are known for using television commercial spots to drive website traffic. There are plenty of examples of what this looks like in practice, but the financial services company John Hancock is perhaps the best.
Over the past year, John Hancock has run commercials that tell a brief 30-second story. Just as the commercial climaxes and the viewer is about to find out what happens, the camera cuts away to a blue screen with the text, “Find out what happens at HancockNext.com.”
While most people will forget about the commercial, a small percentage will be curious enough to pull out their phones and visit the site. Once on the site, visitors are presented with three different endings – each of which speaks to a particular service offered by John Hancock. It’s a simple and clever way to merge online and offline marketing.
The tricky part about marketing is that there’s no right or wrong strategy. What works for one company may be totally ineffective for another organization within the same industry. Until you give a certain technique a try, it’s impossible to know what’s effective.
However, it’s not smart to narrow your focus down to a single approach until you’ve tested a variety of methods. While digital marketing gets the bulk of the attention in 2016, there are plenty of ways to incorporate traditional methods.
Think about the strategies referenced in this article and seek a happy medium between online and offline marketing.
