Online Strategies to Support Your Offline Marketing Efforts

Do you know how your online advertising dollars are supporting your offline marketing efforts?

In this digital-centric day and age, it’s important for marketers to be aware of creating a consistent, multi-faceted marketing strategy that makes the most of the online and offline opportunities to reach customers and drive sales.

To be successful, online ads need offline support. The best approach is a well-rounded plan that exploits the strengths of each and works to create brand extension. First, be aware of the tools at your disposal, including programmatic, display, mobile and native ads, as well as search and search retargeting strategies. These elements should complement each other to create a consistent brand message across multiple platforms.

Two words to remember are engagement and emotion. One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is the ability to engage directly with the customer. People get tired of the hard sell, so instead engage with them on a personal, emotional level with humorous, playful or heartwarming content. Decide on a tone and a theme and create a consistent story across your website, banner ads, blog posts and print ads that engage the customer and makes them a part of your conversation. Create a dialogue, not monologue, with your brand.

Hashtags (#) are another way to accomplish this. This simple symbol establishes a community of your brand’s followers across social, digital and print. By carrying the message over to print, you tie your offline and online worlds together.

This is especially important with mobile advertising, where ad buying is growing faster than all other forms of digital ad spending, with $20 billion estimated for 2015. Not only should you include your hashtag statement in your print ads but consider including a mobile tag to engage mobile users.

Unlike print advertising with its long lead times, deadlines and sell-by dates, digital ads can pivot almost immediately in response to customer engagement. This means your online ads and search re-targeting can constantly evolve to match your customers’ needs. Online response is measurable and thus actionable. Search re-targeting offers up ads to users after they’ve taken a specific action. A click on a link or ad then populates future ads with your message because the customer has already expressed an interest in your brand.

Search re-targeting, used in conjunction with programmatic ads (which involve the use of software to purchase ad buys), are efficient tools that can automate your ad purchases and targeting attempts.

Your online marketing efforts also yield faster ROI, allowing a user’s actions to drive the relationship. By giving your customers the ability to immediately interact with your marketing, you have the potential to offer them exactly what they want and convert sales more quickly. The customer is in control, and that’s a good thing.

There are over 2.92 billion people using computers and mobile devices to access the Internet. Your marketing mix must address these customers in this space to bring them physically to your space. Marrying online and offline marketing strategies is the only way to engage customers and form a coherent strategy to create maximum impact.