Offline marketing used to be the only kind of marketing, but since the advent of the internet that has changed. But as we have seen, offline marketing does still have a role to play – not least when you link it to your online marketing.
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So what can you do with the online and offline marketing tricks at your disposal? Here are some of the basics.
Put customer URLs on everything
The simplest way to bring offline and online together is to put distinct URLs (web addresses) on each piece of marketing: so a special URL on leaflets, another different one on your posters and so on. This means that the once untrackable offline marketing tools can suddenly yield some data about how effective they are.
Each click will show how many people came from that particular offline marketing source.
The key thing is to use your basic company URL and add ‘uniqueness’ through sub-addresses so that you are using, for example, www.yourcompany.com/leaflet for your leaflets.
You can make this still easier to use for consumers – as they will be holding a piece of paper in their hand and will have to tap in the address – by registering the specific URL with something like bit.ly which will throw up a nice short URL for the user to use.
Put QR codes on everything
This day and age, with people carrying smartphones rather than computers, you can make your offline marketing – be it a leaflet, a poster or a flyer or whatever – ‘interactive’ and connected to the web by simply giving each offline channel a unique URL as above, but rather than using that, convert it to a QR code using a QR code generator such as qrstiff.com or the-qr-code-generator.com. These will produce a unique QR for each address you give it, for free.
Make sure you incorporate it into your design in a prominent position and, depending on how tech-savvy your audience is, you may need some simple text to explain what to do with it – and perhaps even a URL as to where they can download a QR scanner.
Hashtag a-go-go
Along the same lines as putting URLs and QRs on everything, you can also add hashtags (or an octothorp to give it its proper name) to your offline marketing materials so that people can write about you on twitter – and you can track people writing about you on twitter and follow them.
In this way you can build an effective twitter database from offline marketing materials.
Add social ‘links’
While Hashtags work for twitter, it may well be worth spelling out how and where you can be found on other social networks such as Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. This way you again can use your offline marketing to drive people into linking with you online so that you can engage them and track them.
Offer rewards
A powerful way to get users who see or pick up your offline material to engage online – or even to act on the call to action in the offline marketing – is to offer rewards.
Typically, this takes the form of “money off with this leaflet”, but if you want to drive people to buy from your online presence having found out about you offline is to print a discount code along with the URL/QR code so that when they are driven to your site they can get a bargain there and then.
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