Marketing an online business ‘offline’

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The line between online and offline is becoming ever more blurred, and there are plenty of ways of marketing your business that span both.

Fifteen years ago few businesses had a website, and even email was still in its relative infancy. Online marketing was a new phenomenon, suffering the teething troubles to be expected when any new technology goes mainstream. Since then, budgets for online marketing have rocketed, by some estimates now accounting for around a quarter of all marketing. For smaller businesses, perhaps based predominantly on the web, this figure will be much higher. Online marketing in its many forms – paid search, SEO, social networking and more – is relatively cheap and easy to access for those who know what they are doing. Some businesses may completely avoid offline marketing, believing that they can achieve better results by spending the same money online, but this is usually a mistake.

Online vs offline?

There are some extremely easy ways to market your business in the ‘real world’ – ones which cost next to nothing and can have a significant effect. Not only that, but ‘offline’ doesn’t really mean offline any more. With the profusion of mobile phones, particularly smart phones, the cross-over between real and virtual is growing, presenting further opportunities to guide people to your website.

QR codes

One of the most obvious examples of this tendency is the rise of the QR code. A QR or Quick Response Code is a square of pixels that is effectively a kind of sophisticated two-dimensional bar code. The quantity of data that can be stored in them varies depending on the resolution and the quality. It’s best to keep things relatively simple, since some less sophisticated smart phones will not be able to read complex QR codes. At the very least, you can store a website address in them, which will load automatically when snapped by a smart phone. You can also store text, SMS messages, telephone numbers and even calendar entries in them. If you haven’t seen them in action yet, you will soon: their use has soared in recent months and will doubtless continue to do so with the increase in smart phone use. This is one area in which the online and offline merge beautifully thanks to convergent technology.

Joined-up branding

Most online businesses will still operate to some degree in the real world. This might be because you send out mail or packages, or because you also have a physical store. Even if none of these apply, you should still have business cards that you can give to interested parties (these are cheaply available from most digital printing companies). These should all display your email and web address, as well as your company name and tagline. The same goes for your email signature. If you do use QR codes, they are also perfect ways to give potential customers a short-cut to visiting your site.

Conclusion

The online and offline worlds are increasingly linked, due largely to the growing popularity of smart phones and other portable browsing devices. These present cheap and simple ways to funnel potential customers to your site that should not be overlooked, even by businesses that operate almost exclusively via the internet.

This article was supplied by Nick Green of printed.com, a supplier of quality leaflet printing and an accredited member of the Direct Marketing Association.

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