In today’s world, consumers are gravitating more and more towards online shopping and using social media to connect with their favorite brands.
Online engagement is at all time high between business owners and consumers, yet offline engagement – good, old face-to-face interaction – still continues to flourish.
Despite the ease and anonymity of online shopping, people feel much more connected with a business when they can put a face to the product or service, or better yet, have a conversation with the person in charge.
There’s no doubt that both online and offline marketing have their own unique advantages. But, if you can learn to combine the two, you have the potential of creating a truly exciting experience for your customers.
Below are 3 ways for you to do just that.
1. Encourage Offline Engagement with Social Media
Every day, you probably come across a piece of promotional mail from brands trying to entice you to shop at their stores. Most of that stuff you throw away…until you notice something that catches your eye.
At that point, all bets are off, and you start seriously considering whether or not you should pay a visit to that store.
This same approach can be used in social media.
Say for example that you own a food truck business. Most food truck owners don’t sit in one spot – they tend to drive around town to popular hangouts at peak times.
In order to find out where people can find you, you might encourage customers to follow you on Facebook, then post where you’re located.
You’re using social media to entice customers to go offline and come buy from your business.
This is a fantastic way to encourage offline, in-person engagement using an online technique.
2. Drive Online Attendance through Offline Efforts
You can actually take the exact process from above, reverse engineer it, and drive online attendance through offline interaction.
Sticking with the food truck example, now you decide that you’re going to start selling recipe books online as a way to diversify your business’ income.
To promote your new recipe book, you’re going to host an online seminar that walks through the recipes and teaches customers the basics of cooking. What a fabulous idea!
The only problem is that your online presence isn’t nearly as powerful as your offline presence.
In order to drive more online action to your business, you can create flyers and tell people face-to-face that you’re hosting an online event.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can only use online marketing to drive traffic to an online event. Use your strengths in the offline realm, if applicable, to boost your online effectiveness.
3. Broadcast or Post Videos from In-Person Events
If you’re a business owner who frequently exhibits at trade shows, you have a great opportunity to boost your online marketing through those offline efforts.
People love feeling connected and a part of experiences. The next time you’re at a trade show, film it. Take video and post it online afterwards so that others, who perhaps couldn’t make it, have the chance to experience it for themselves.
Even better yet, film it live! You can broadcast it directly online via something like Facebook Live or Periscope, or you can upload the full video after the fact.
Either way, you’re engaging your online customers in a unique way that makes them want to make the trip to visit your business in an offline setting.
Worst case scenario, even if those people choose not to come to the next event, they’ll be able to share that online content with others who may decide to attend in the future.
Conclusion
You should never miss an opportunity to leverage an online business with offline efforts, or vice versa. By combining the two, you create a unique, yet powerfully effective strategy that appeals to customers of all different flavors.
The experience provided will be truly exciting, and you will have many more raving fans than you ever thought possible.
Resources: Digital Marketing
