Traditional Offline vs Online Digital Marketing

Advantages of Combining Fundamental Sales Strategies

This post reveals the key fundamentals & advantages behind combining both traditional offline marketing methods with online marketing strategies, from email to direct mail, so you get bigger results for your effort, and more sales and profits.

Breaking Out Of The Online Marketing Rut:

Marketing foundations don’t change.

At it’s core marketing is about:

• Finding and making contact with people who can buy from you.
• Creating a process that gets them to buy from you.
• Following up with those people in a way that compels them to buy from you again and recommend other people to buy from you.

Most internet marketers immediately recognize methods to do that online…

Finding & Making Contact With People Who Can Buy From You…

To do this online marketers use:

• Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and other platforms.
• Pay per click marketing.
• Media buying.
• Joint ventures with marketers who have email lists in the same or related niches.
• Search engine optimization.
• Video marketing on sites like YouTube.
• PR, media outreach & Press Releases like PressCable
• Content marketing.
• Viral marketing.

Creating A Process That Gets People To Buy From You…

Common methods to do this online include:

• Follow up by email
• Lead generating reports delivered online that educate prospects on the value of a product or a service to them
• Videos that educate prospects on the value of a product or a service to them
• Online sales letters
• Webinars
• Articles that persuade prospects to buy

Follow Up To Get Repeat Buyers & Referrals…

Online marketers do this with:

• Follow up by email.
• Follow up with social media platforms
• Follow up that leads to content or sales letters promoting other products or services.

The Most Important Foundation Of All…

What’s more important than the strategies used is that most good marketing is about building relationships and trust with real people.

That’s what leads to sales, follow up sales and referrals.

Here’s where things get interesting.

Most (but not all) online marketers are leaving huge sums of money on the table because they’re ignoring the marketing potential of offline strategies.

Some clever online marketers have embraced the combination of online and offline marketing strategies and their returns and profits increase almost exponentially.

Smart marketers have discovered that offline strategies like direct mail, telemarketing, physical seminars dramatically increase the price they can sell products and services at over online marketing alone.

And they also dramatically increase the depth of relationships that the marketers build with their prospects and customers.

Offline Strategies…

This report is not meant to be a step by step guide.

It’s an introduction to the idea of combining online and offline marketing strategies.

Any one of these offline strategies might require a whole pile of education to use effectively.

Old school marketers are already very familiar with most of these strategies.

They’re not new and they work in much the same way as online strategies except for a few key and very important factors:

• Most offline methods are far more effective. You can sell a much higher percentage of prospects at much higher prices using offline methods.
• Offline methods can often be scaled up in a huge way. Businesses have been built from shoestring budgets into enterprises worthy hundreds of millions of dollars in the direct mail industry because of the potential to scale up direct mail pieces that produce a positive return on investment.
• Most offline methods have a physical cost which means there can be an element of risk if you’re not careful. You need to be constantly aware of your costs and returns and ensure whatever method you use makes you a profit.

Different Offline Marketing Strategies…

The huge range of offline marketing strategies include:

• Direct mail…letters
• Direct mail…postcards
• Direct mail…lumpy mail (packages and letters with some kind of physical attention grabber in them).
• Referral direct mail to a list of customers from a business in a related niche.
• Telemarketing…cold calling
• Telemarketing…calling prospects who have already expressed an interest in a product or service.
• Telemarketing…calling customers who’ve already purchased to sell other products and services.
• Referral telemarketing…calling customers from a business in a related niche.
• Personal one-on-one appointments.
•  Physical seminars and conferences.
• Trade shows.
• Parties and get-togethers.

Sequences Combining Online & Offline Elements…

A highly lucrative area that’s barely been touched is using processes that combine online and offline strategies.

Some parts of the sales process work better online, some work better offline and some work better when you include both.

To complicate things more different types of prospects and prospects in different niches all respond to different combinations of marketing strategies in different ways.

So there’s no “one size fits all” approach.

You need to test different methods and combinations to see what works for the particular situation you’re dealing with.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to narrow down your options:

• What is the ideal way to move a prospect in this part of the sales process forward?
• What is the lowest cost way of taking the next step in this process? It will probably be online.
• What is the most effective way? It will probably be offline.

You can weigh up the different factors and remember that you’re not limited to using just one strategy. You can use multiple strategies at the same time to increase your results and to see which strategies are getting you the best return.

Always Going Back To Foundational Principles…

Adding offline marketing strategies into your marketing mix can create an exciting and bewildering array of different options.

The easiest way to avoid making costly mistakes and to stay focused on what’s really important is to keep yourself tapped into the marketing fundamentals I mentioned at the start of this report.

Remember at its core marketing is about:

• Finding and making contact with people who can buy from you.
• Creating a process that gets them to buy from you.

Following up with those people in a way that compels them to buy from you again and recommend other people to buy from you.

Also keep asking yourself as you’re setting up marketing strategies:

What is the ideal way to move a prospect in this part of the sales process forward?

Staying focused on those foundations will help you get a good percentage of positive results.