The dominance of the screen in the digital age tempts marketers to focus on solely online campaigns.
While it’s vital to reach people where they spend most of their time, it’s crucial that you don’t entirely ignore the value of tried and tested offline marketing tactics too.
Offline channels such as direct mail marketing have been popular for decades, and with good reason.
Direct mail marketing allows you to know exactly who will see your marketing materials and to target highly specific audiences through a carefully crafted mailing list.
The most effective approach is a holistic one - combining the best aspects of both offline and online marketing channels so that they augment and complement each other.
Here are some of the ways that offline marketing efforts can support and improve your online campaigns.
Think about the local market, the demographics of your customers and how you pitch your online campaigns.
Carry that targeting and those messages into your offline materials, so that they are consistent and reinforce each other.
Choose your target audience carefully. Focus and repeat your message across all media channels available to you.
The best offline marketing materials are the most memorable.
Getting your brand and your message across quickly will mean that it’s easier to recall again in the future.
The more often a potential customer sees your brand, the more likely they are to convert.
This is why you need to make sure that, when someone sees your online and offline marketing materials, they quickly associate the two with the same company and the same brand identity.
It also helps to be as clear as possible about what your business does.
When your name appears in search results, potential customers will make the connection immediately and know that you’re a familiar name.
Much of this will be subconscious, but it’s the real value of getting your brand name out there and known, which is where offline marketing excels.
Offline marketing materials should show off the best aspects of your products and services.
They need to be clear on how they meet the needs of your target audience.
If the first message fails to meet that objective, it’s unlikely they’ll pay attention to you again.
Create demand, create interest, demand attention.
Connect your marketing strategies by using offline materials to direct potential customers to a custom landing page with a unique URL for the campaign.
Consider implementing well thought out AR (Augmented Reality) experiences to enable the offline and online world to work in harmony together. Pepper’s creative designers provide everything you need to create compelling, timely and relevant interactive print experiences for your customer to enjoy. What’s more, new content can be tracked and monitored enabling similar tracking and marketing insights that you can already achieve in the online world.
This allows you to control the “user experience” a potential customer has when they visit your site after seeing offline marketing materials.
You can also track visits to the landing page to accurately measure the success of the campaign.
Direct mail marketing materials are easy to link to your online channels in this way, as are print ads in magazines and newspapers.
There is no better way to connect your offline and online presence in such a direct, measurable manner.
Add a discount code, with a deadline to drive swifter responses, linked to a short and easy-to-copy URL, or a contact form.
Make it as easy as possible and your response rates will rise as a result.
Use your offline marketing materials to set the tone for the user experience that potential customers will have when they visit your site.
Remember, if you want offline and online channels to support each other effectively, focus on making all of your marketing materials memorable, consistent and clear.
For help or advice running direct mail marketing campaigns that work, get in touch with Pepper’s experienced account managers today.