Bridging the Gap Between On and Offline Marketing

Alexandra Hagler - October 27, 2010

Sometimes online and offline marketing strategies can vary throughout different media channels; T.V., radio, local (billboard, print, banners, lamp post flags), pay-per-click (banner, keywords) and more. It is important to keep a consistent flow and messaging throughout all of the various marketing channels especially in your branding messages.

For example, if you are putting out lamp post banners in your downtown area and billboards on the local roads and expressways to promote a special event like a food and wine festival, the messaging would be more powerful layered with online advertising such as search or content with banner ads that deliver the same look and feel of the lamp post message.

For the simplicity of this example, the advertising period is 30 days. Billboards and Lamp post banners have one fixed cost and it is difficult to see a direct ROI from this form of advertising alone. Online advertising (assuming you have a conversion point on your website) is easier to measure and ROI can be determined by looking at the total amount spent divided by your signups online. In online advertising, it is important to notice that you can control many different factors and use these in conjunction with each other to get the “best bang for your buck” online. 

Some dynamic features to use in online advertising:
 
Search Campaigns

• Geo-target your campaigns to a radius (how far do you think people would drive)
• Target people who would have otherwise not known about the festival using keywords around food/wine, etc.
• Use a special offer or discount code
• Send them to a different landing page
• Schedule your ads to only run certain times of the day or week.
• Exclude keywords and phrases
• Directly control your budget and bids (turn off at anytime)

Content Campaigns

• Target certain Food/Wine websites
• Use “keyword” targeting to place your text or banner ad on a website
• Place banner ads with the same look and feel in a pre-determined radius around the event.
• Use a special offer or discount code
• Send them to a different landing page
• Schedule your ads only to run certain times of the day or week.
• Exclude certain, non-relevant websites
• Directly control your budget and bids (turn off at anytime)

Implementing a multi-channel marketing plan will help complement all forms of advertising. Even though you might not see a direct impact from one or the other, statistics have shown that people might not convert the first time they are aware of the product. For example, a person might see the billboard when driving on the highway each morning, but not actually purchase a ticket to the event until they are surfing the web on their favorite cooking blog in the evening and see the special offer. So, be sure you are leveraging all special touch points with your potential audience or target customers.