Why Offline Marketing is Still Relevant

“When the masses go left, go right”

While we couldn’t find the origin of this quote, we can certainly explain it. The natural curve of trends demonstrates that most people follow a bandwagon. And while everyone is looking in one direction, immense opportunity lays in the other. That other direction has fewer eyes pointed at it and of course, less people exploiting the opportunities hidden in plain sight.

Sometimes offline is just the best way to go. Whether it be to break through the clutter, to reach an older demographic, to circumvent spam laws or a variety of other reasons. No marketing plan is complete until you’ve at least looked at the possibility of including offline as a part of your Mktg Plan.

Let’s look at some examples of when offline is an essential part of a marketing plan.

Moving companies

Having created marketing plans for moving companies we can say a lot about this one. The marketing mix here is quite cunning.

Obviously a big part of it is online. Google SEO, Google PPC. You can also buy high quality moving leads from companies that focus on generating these. Caution here, however. You have to be very efficient in your business if you plan on purchasing these. These leads are sold to 5 – 8 companies at a time and the early & most professional bird gets the worm. If you are rock solid in your processes and your staff is on board with being the best, this is a great option. Calling these leads within 5 minutes or more of receiving the leads can result in a 50 to 70% close rate.

The offline portion of this marketing plan is where it gets interesting. Every day, dozens of houses sell in a particular city. Let’s use Ottawa as an example. 30 to 70 homes a day are sold in the summer. The information for all these homes can be found online. We would associate with a real estate agent and have them put us on an auto email list of all the homes that sell every day and send a letter to each one of those homes, offering our services. Depending on your scripting, these letters can be highly effective. This mass sniper approach is killer and has made our clients Millions!

Seniors Companies

This one is pretty obvious. Seniors are using the internet more and more, but it is safe to say that the majority will go to the grave never having used a computer. Sorry for the morbidity here. Then, even if you did manage to reach your older demographic, converting them is a whole other story. You may know this if you’re close to someone in the demographic group, but seniors are highly targeted by scammers both over the phone and online. This means that the second you ask them for personal information or a credit card, you automatically fall into their list of suspicious people. That’s a hard place to sell, or convert from.

The point is, you will never reach the majority of this demographic if you only focus online. And in a business serving seniors, not marketing offline is not an option, of course.

Home Buyers

There are small and large teams dedicated to either buying and holding or flipping homes. These people either are or sometimes appear to be small operations. They want to make themselves appear more approachable by appearing small. A way they do this is to send out copies of a hand written letter that explains to the writer that they buy homes for cash or fair market value. These copies of the handwritten letter are sent to thousands of homes and truly cut through the clutter. Why?

1. It’s a hand written note

2. It’s not in an envelope

3. It’s directly in the mailbox

4. It is not crowded by the 1000s of online ads also competing for your attention

But the main reason that these work so well is this. The demographic they are targeting are barely online. They are targeting an older demographic that is looking to downsize now that all the kids have moved out and have their own homes. Even if the seniors are online, they may not be searching for companies or individuals to buy the home. They would be searching for a real estate agent to help them list the home. By using this strategy, you are eliminating the guesswork of whether or not the person is a homeowner or not and in your target area or not.

For those that aren’t familiar with the term pay per click, allow us to clarify.

There are 2 ways of appearing at the top of google. One method is by making your site appear attractive to the masses in order to for google to rank it organically. This is search engine optimization. The other, pay-per-click, is to pay google directly for ad space at the top of the page. While you may think you don’t need an intermediary to buy ad space from google, a quick visit to an advertising campaign creation page will display many options that you aren’t sure about. These options if misunderstood or improperly calibrated can result in 1000s of wasted ad dollars every month depending on the geographic coverage.

Speaking to an SEO or marketing expert while starting your business can save you years of the slow grind to greatness and instead, take you into hectic money making madness, years sooner. Some companies may charge you for this consult. As entrepreneurs, these kinds of conversations excite us. We do them for free.