How to Use Offline Media to Interact With Customers Online

It’s a mistake to focus all your marketing energies online. When it comes to successful marketing, offline media can be an incredibly useful gateway to reach customers online. This is becoming ever-more important as time goes on as people make more purchases online and unprecedented events such as the coronavirus pandemic mean physical sales decrease temporarily, or even permanently.

Not only this, when both techniques are used wisely it can reveal useful insights into your customers and how they behave in the real world, allowing you to adjust your campaigns quickly and seamlessly.

But what methods are most successful?

The key step is to use the physical world to send people to your online portal. For example, if a customer signs up to marketing information in a shop, cinema or other physical space, you can then reach them through email and push notifications on their phone. As they have decided to opt into your marketing material, they are far more likely to be willing to take advantage of promotional offers and become loyal customers.

This means it’s vital to ensure your adverts and promotional campaigns are in the right place. It’s impossible and costly to place adverts everywhere so the smart move is to study your customers and work out what physical locations they are likely to use. Targeting your ads in this way keeps your advertising budget down while ensuring they’re in the right place to reach the most amount of potential customers.

It’s worth being aware of the benefits of physical ads. They often provide more consistent, long-term exposure. For example, a magazine or bill-board can deliver your message many times over, for an extended amount of time. This means increased brand awareness and more potential for word-of-mouth influence.

Of course, this means optimising your ads. By using online responses to work out what channels are most effective, you can revisit your offline locations and refine them, investing in the more effective spaces and scaling back on the rest.

The landscape of marketing is forever changing and it can be tricky to balance budgets while targeting a wide range of advertising channels. Rather than focusing all your energies on traditional media or solely targeting the digital realm, the key is to combine both offline and online experiences then analyse the data to work out the most effective approach. By using physical media to funnel customers towards your online portals, not only will you have a direct line to your most valuable consumers you’ll also gather the information that can help you craft the kind of marketing campaigns that benefit both your business and your clientele for many years to come.