Online and Offline Marketing

Online and offline marketing. Do we have to choose? Online marketing has broken into the sector using innovative ways to reach customers and many companies have chosen to focus their efforts on the network, a type of marketing that is cheaper. But is it more effective?

Advantages of Online Marketing

The price: With the right knowledge, launching an online marketing strategy is less expensive than some offline actions such as paying for expensive ads in the media.

Segmented audience: Online marketing allows to establish very precise criteria to reach a specific audience, although offline marketing can also carry out a certain segmentation according to geographical or consumption habits.

Instant accessibility: It can be accessed every day, 24 hours a day. Banners, websites, etc.

It is measurable: With digital marketing you can obtain very precise metrics that allow you to analyze the campaign in real time and change strategies with much more room for maneuver.

Without geographical limits: Internet opens the possibility for small and medium enterprises to expand where they want to reach.

Advantages of offline Marketing

More impact: Many Internet users are more than used to banners, pop-ups, and continuous messages on social networks and quickly forget them. An original poster or a shocking television ad manages to reach a large number of people in just a few minutes and last much longer in the minds of users.

Durability: Some offline marketing actions, such as the distribution of merchandising, accompany users for a long time and help maintain the brand image over time. However, the durability is very variable depending on the type of support: while an advertisement in a newspaper will expire in one day, a billboard will do so in a few weeks and a directory will have a much longer period of validity.

Credibility: The feeling of closeness produced by the mailbox, business cards, media or street marketing campaigns is much greater than what online marketing can achieve. In addition, users respond more positively to a support they can grab and touch.

Effective at the local level: Actions such as the distribution of flyers at the local level remain quite effective and do not require a large investment of money. Similarly, the printed guides support a type of offline advertising that is very useful for businesses with a limited scope of activity, since it is distributed in delimited geographical areas.

How to make a Global Marketing Strategy?

Online and offline marketing are not exclusive, but they form a perfect synergy to increase the effectiveness of any campaign. To do this, they must share the same goals and the same message on both channels.

In this way, offline marketing can be used to create and strengthen online communities and that customers continue in daily contact with the business, within the digital environment. To meet this objective you can add QR codes that redirect to a certain offer on the web or encourage you to follow the company on social networks On the other hand, tools such as SEO, SEM or social networks can turn online traffic offline inviting to go to the points of sale, physical events, raffling merchandising, invitations to fairs where you can find the product …

In fact, consumers continue to blur more and more the border between online and offline and demonstrate it with their shopping habits. There is currently a tendency to use the Internet as a means to search, document and investigate, and then make the purchase in a physical place that allows you to touch and see the product closely, a behavior that is called ROBO (‘Research Online to Buy Offline ‘, in Spanish’ Search Online to Buy Offline ‘).

Consumers already see this alliance clearly. It is time for companies to do it too.

What do you think? 😉

Alex Romero – Digital Marketing Expert
Marketing Digital Malaga