Online marketing is crucial to small business success today–but on its own, it’s not always enough. Do you have a brick-and-mortar business with an online component, such as a retail store that also sells products online or an accounting business with a website featuring blogs and tax advice? In many ways, a website is only as good as the amount of traffic it generates. The truth of this statement probably varies from site to site. If you want to get more website traffic, one of the smartest moves you can make is to integrate both offline and online marketing tactics.
Sure, online marketing is important for a website (or even for a brick-and-mortar business), but many small business owners forget how offline marketing can also drive traffic to a website. Here are some tips.
List Your Website Everywhere
Whether it’s on your invoices, business cards or product packaging, make sure your website address is listed everywhere. This additional exposure, even to people who may already be familiar with your company, can help improve your share of the market and cause your company to pop into consumers’ minds first when they have needs that you can fulfill.
Use tools to track offline spend
As a marketer, you need to know exactly which parts of your marketing are working. In the digital realm, tools such as Google Analytics make this easier than ever, this graph, lifted straight from Analytics, shows exactly where the traffic is coming from.
As you can see, the website is riding high at the top of Google’s rankings and the vast majority of traffic is from natural search. The referral strategy is also pulling its weight, where PPC, social media and E-mail are struggling to make an impact. Not all your marketing will go as expected, and identifying what works is the first step towards fixing it.
For all the channels listed, Google Analytics allows us to further break them down discover exactly who our key players are. Which keywords are driving search traffic? Which social platform is the most engaging?
One that cannot be broken down is direct traffic, which is accounting for almost a quarter of our customers. If you have a lot of offline material directing people to your site, you know some of it is working, but you can’t be sure which.
This is where tools such as custom URLs come in. By using shortened versions of your URL on your offline adverts, or directing to a specific landing page, you can track which of them are bringing in the money.
Standardize Your Cross-Platform Message
Don’t let separate departments create different images and messages. An integrated campaign targets the same people with the same images, promotions, and words. For example, an ad placed in the newspaper targeted at adults seeking security should not provide a URL to a company website that advocates an edgy lifestyle and taking risks.
Offline Reach Building
Do you include URLs for your social media accounts in your offline marketing materials? You should. When working to build online reach, including your account information in offline materials can help inform potential social media connections who may have never known about your online content. The next time you are printing brochures or designing an ad, make sure to include your social media profile URLS to encourage people who find you offline to follow you online, too. Avoid simply including logos for Twitter and Facebook without providing your URLs. This doesn't help your business; rather, it's free advertising for those social networks.
TMO group provides China online to offline (O2O commerce) solutions and development for local service and omni channel retailors. We develop a unified O2O system to support and connect online website and offline shops and mobile terminal. More information please send us an email!
