3 Ways to Effectively Combine Online and Offline Marketing
If you are still approaching online and offline marketing as separate campaigns, you are missing out on plenty of opportunities to reach your target market. Online and offline marketing use different tools and are often crafted differently, but that doesn’t mean they have to be completely separate from one another.
In recent years, brands and businesses have begun to take a more holistic approach to marketing, utilizing all marketing instruments available to achieve greater results. The combination of online and offline marketing can amplify your return on marketing investment and we are going to review how you can get started in this article.
Cross-Call to Action
The easiest way to combine online and offline marketing is by adding a call to action that points to the other side. A simple example is using custom pins to promote your website and your social media accounts, all while increasing your brand exposure at the same time.
A campaign like this is easy to run. You can make custom pins for a small fee with the help of lapelpinsuperstore.com. The store offers customizable pins and coins to share with your audience. With the merchandise made, you can run a promotional offer for customers that visit your store.
While the offline campaign is running, run an online campaign promoting the free pin offer. You will be bringing a lot of the online audience to your retail locations. As you can see, the two support each other and help you reach a wider audience.
Get Online Users Involved
Users love to be involved in product development. Listening to their input when developing a new product – and actually implementing that input – is a fantastic way to appreciate them. Now that you can do this online, you can also skip the FGDs and surveys.
With your new product made according to the insights of your customers, you can run an offline campaign promoting those whose input affected the final product. Adding such details to the product packaging and your store locations is a great way to get offline customers engaged.
To tie the two campaigns together, spark an online discussion on social media. A poster explaining how User A (our example online user) provided you with the ideas for a new feature, followed by a call to thank User A and using a particular hashtag would be perfect.
Promote User-Generated Contents
Another classic is asking users to post their content on social media. Thanks to location feature – a feature that is now available on all social media platforms – you no longer need to enforce a hashtag to allow monitoring. More importantly, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get the ball rolling, especially when you consider how much people love posting their stories on social media.
Simply ask walk-in customers to post a selfie or a photo of your product or to share their experience while visiting your locations and you’ll start getting plenty of social media mentions and user-generated posts. Provide an incentive – like the custom pin we discussed earlier – to persuade walk-in customers to post more.
Those posts will spark curiosity in the mind of your online users. A trending hashtag or mention, for instance, will draw attention to the offline campaign you’re running, as well as at your retail locations. You also gain a larger exposure for your brand since users are posting their UGCs to their own followers.
These three ways are some of the ways you can effectively combine online and offline marketing campaigns. The possibilities are endless – there are plenty of ways you can integrate the two and achieve great results. If you are interested in more ideas for online-offline campaigns, stay tuned right here on this site!
