Tag Archives: Offline Promotions

Offline Promotions, Promotional Products

Offline Marketing Ideas Anyone Can Use to Grow Their Business

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by Andrew McCombe

There is a lot of buzz these days about internet marketing, and it is true that it is a great, cost effective way to build a brand, and gain new business. However, whether you are running a brick and mortar business, or an online enterprise, there are still some great offline marketing ideas that you should not ignore.

Every day, you come into contact with hundreds, if not thousands of people, all of whom are potential clients for your business. While your online marketing and other advertising methods are important, it’s as important to take advantage of those chance encounters, and there are plenty of ways you can do that.

Offline marketing has the same goal as your marketing efforts online – it is designed to help drive traffic to your website or business. Print advertising, radio ads, and other forms of marketing and advertising that are not on the internet all fall into this category, but often, they are far beyond the budget of the small business owner.

The secret is to think outside of the box a little bit, and come up with offline marketing ideas that cost as little as possible, but that have maximum impact, and will get you the most exposure possible.

One of the most important things you should do is to always be armed with your business cards. You never know when you will meet someone who may be interested in, or useful to, your small business, and this is the cornerstone of offline marketing for your business. Keep business cards in your car, in your wallet or in your purse, and make sure that you always have them ready to hand over to anyone who seems interested.

Another great offline marketing idea is a low tech one. Have a t-shirt printed with your company details on it, and wear it when you go to events. You never know when someone at your child’s sports day will be your next big client, or someone you meet on the golf course is a new supplier with a great product, and by wearing your t-shirt, you open a channel for dialogue.

Flyers, or discount coupons are another great offline marketing tool that you can use to generate interest in your business. Have them printed with your latest special offers, or with a promotional code that customers can use to save on their next purchase. At the very least, when someone who receives one needs a product or service you provide, they will contact you for a quote.

Then there are so called guerrilla marketing tactics. These are marketing tactics that are designed to get people’s attention, but they need not be difficult or complicated to achieve. Simply having your website, and nothing else, printed on stickers, and then placing those stickers wherever you are allowed to, can generate more traffic for your business, and more sales.

If your budget for offline advertising is a little bigger, consider sponsoring an event, or even the scoreboard at your local school. Many organisations are always on the look out for sponsorships, and by taking part, you are doing some good, and you will get credited for it.

Networking is another great method of offline marketing. Nearly every city and town has at least one business networking group, and there are usually trade or commerce associations you can join too. These events usually put you in touch with likeminded business people, and can be a great source of referrals and business to business leads.

There is an old saying – no man is an island – and the same is true of your business. While the internet is great as a marketing tool, and it may even be your entire business, there is still a lot of value to offline marketing too. Personal connections, and real interactions with people can often be the catalyst that takes your business to the next level.

When you spend time on offline marketing efforts, you will connect with real people. Those people may just become your biggest clients, or they may be valuable business contacts. They are also likely to share what they have learned about you and your business with their friends, and word of mouth is still a powerful form of advertising.

So whether your business is online or off, it is a good idea to look for offline marketing ideas that meet your budget and your marketing needs, and put them into practice. It cannot hurt your business, and it can certainly do a lot to boost your success.

About the Author

Andrew McCombe is the owner of Activate Your Business where they teach new and existing business owners to Start, Grow and / or Automate their business(es) with EASE, so they can live a life of EASE. For more information and to get a free copy of the 10 EASY Steps to Your Perfect Business EBook, visit http://www.activateyourbusiness.com.au

Offline Promotions

Why Active Offline Advertising Can Prove More Beneficial

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Author: Naz Daud

034/365
Photo by kawafaceOffline advertising can often be forgotten or ignored with the progress of internet technology. But to ignore the opportunities which advertising offline, or ‘real world’ advertising, has to offer, is to cut off a significant portion of your potential success. Internet technology might reach customers on the other side of the planet, but if you’re a regional business how is this of any help to you? Distributing mail shots, slipping flyers in with the local free paper of displaying adverts in shop windows will be more likely to reach the customers you’re actually after.

Internet banners are seen, and almost immediately forgotten. No one bookmarks a web page because of the adverts. However, with offline advertising there is a very real chance that people will see your advert time and time again. How much would it cost you to print off a few hundred flyers, and slip them under the wipers of every car in the town center car park at the weekend? For the sake of a few pounds and a couple of hours of your time you could reach hundreds of potential customers.

Certainly many of them will throw the advert away, just as they might click off a web page, but for those few, who might just be interested, you provide a document which can be kept, filed, referred to and which acts as a regular reminder, long after a banner advert on a web page has been forgotten. Offline advertising provides scope for greater variation, more imagination, and above all, far greater durability.

Of course, this isn’t to ignore or forget the online advertising and other forms of brand impression which your business will be seeking to employ. It is important that the brand image is translated seamlessly from one medium to another, and any offline advertising must match online advertising, and any other promotional literature which your business publishes. Brand image is everything, and if your advertising is merely to help impress your business or product name upon people, then this will prove to be more successful through continuity and consistency.

However, having said that, there is a time when sometimes breaking the mold is better and proves more advantageous for your business. When you are considering an advertising or promotional campaign, in whichever medium you choose, it will be important to occasionally consider breaking the rules. Knowing what the rules are gives you a better idea of when to break them. It’s also important to know why you are breaking them.

Let’s consider a scenario – that your business is seeking to expand the sales of a particular product or service. One of the crucial questions you will need to ask is why such an expansion is necessary. Give yourself a rap on the knuckles if you instantly assumed that the reason was to make more money or increase profit. Business is rarely a charity, and so quite clearly any decision or action will be employed in order to try to further the business in this way. However, what you may need to consider is why such expansion is necessary.

The answer may well be because your current clientele only represent a specific portion of the potential market. If you have carried out effective marketing you may have discovered that your product or service is being entirely missed by a significant group or category of people, and it is those people that your offline marketing campaign will be trying to reach.

To some extent, marketing and reaching out to specific groups online can be a good deal easier, since you can use cookie trails to identify potential customers, you can advertise through known sites frequented by the kind of people you’re after, and you can track searches and alter your advertising and promotion on the basis of the keywords being used. In the real world this can prove a little more difficult, and it will be necessary to combine good, effective market research with hard work, and often, leg work too. It will need you to go out to the customers, rather than exploit known patterns online and wait for the right customer to come to you.

To a large extent it will be reasonably obvious that if you are trying to target successful businessmen, there are ways in which any advertising campaign is highly likely to fail, and inserting your adverts into publications rarely read by such people is a guaranteed way to lose your company a fair chunk of money. But it will also be important to consider ways in which you can get the attention of those customers you are after.

Offline advertising can prove to be much more successful, as it can involve active promotion, rather than passive promotion. For example, actively putting documents into people’s hands as they pass in the street, actively arranging a publicity stunt in the town center, or actively giving away products which might really be useful will all help ensure that those suitable people passing by don’t just pass by.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/why-active-offline-advertising-can-prove-more-beneficial-857148.html

About the Author:
Naz Daud – CityLocal Local Business Directory Ireland Local Business Business Franchise Sale Latest Businesses