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Key Off-Line Internet Marketing Strategies That Really Make Your Site Known
These days an internet marketing strategy plays a vital part of small business
marketing strategies (or any size business marketing strategies for that matter).
Web site marketing is an important part of just about any business, small or
large.
You can't put up a beautiful (or any) web site and hope that people will just
arrive. You have to let them know, IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, that your web site
is there. This HAS to be part of any Internet marketing strategy you develop.
This is actually a basic marketing principle. Customers are not going to look
for you, you have to look for them.
Promoting your web site on-line and building traffic is the subject of thousands
of web sites, e-zines, books, courses and seminars. Using the web to promote
your site, however, assumes that your customers are surfers. But there is a
large percentage of our population that is not as savvy with the internet as
we would like them to be.
So, what about the large percentages of the population who are not? They will
only find out about you through traditional marketing and public relations media.
This is particularly true if you serve a fairly local market. Fortunately these
are the easiest and cheapest prospects for you to reach off-line.
Key Off-Line Internet Marketing Strategies
Here are some of the ways to make your web site known (this list was taken
directly from the Traffic Building Volume of Ken Evoy's brilliant book, Make
Your Site Sell! 2002:
- TV, print and other advertising
- Stationary and business cards
- Catalogs, fliers, billboards, blimps, etc.
- Direct mail (prominently on every document)
- Telemarketing (make it part of the script)
- News releases to targeted media.
The main principle, to which you can add all your imagination, is INTERNET
MARKETING STRATEGY INCLUDES ANY AND ALL MEANS OF GETTING YOUR WEB SITE KNOWN
AND VISITED BY TARGETED PROSPECTS.
Unless you have a high budget, the TV, radio, classified ad route is not recommended
but if you do run ads, be sure to mention your web site everywhere. Make it
part of your Internet Marketing Strategy.
Another guiding principle is that your off-line internet marketing activities
should make it easy for your prospect to go straight to your web site. One of
the best ways to market your website off-line is direct mail postcards.
If your prospect sees your website on a billboard as she's driving home, she
probably won't look you up when she gets to the office the next day.
This is not the only medium that has problems like this. Newspapers are bulky,
radio has to spell it out and like before most people are driving at the time.
On the other hand, if your prospect is sitting at her computer and a post card
comes in the mail announcing your web site, she can just turn around and type
in your URL and she's at your web site.
Now if someone is in the office reading a trade journal and comes across an
article about you in the magazine, it's not difficult for him to copy your URL
into his browser and pay your site a visit.
I don’t mean to say that those other avenues won’t drive traffic
to your site, but it will take numerous impressions and repetition to get them
to remember your address.
On the other hand, direct mail postcards are generally received at the home
or office where a computer is present, and if received somewhere else they are
small enough to keep with you until you can get to a computer. This way, your
prospective customer will be able to take the take right over to their desk
top computer, type in your address and go right to your site. Brilliant!
I have seen the greatest success in off-line web site promotion with direct
mail, and specifically direct mail postcards.
About the Author:
Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998, her only assets a computer and a
phone. By 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales and employed over
60 people. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible
staff and her innate marketing savvy. Now she’s sharing her marketing secrets
with others. For more free marketing advice, visit her website at www.postcardmania.com |
