Online marketing gives newcomers to the business world an opportunity to measure the ROI of every single dollar they spend promoting their business. This alone is an opportunity that they simply can’t ignore nor turn a blind eye to.
As a result, these first-time entrepreneurs get so obsessed with digital marketing that they completely fail to give offline marketing even the slightest of considerations. This is a grievous mistake, seeing as how there’s much to gain from this. Here are top six forgotten offline marketing strategies that are still alive and kicking. Read more at active my home
Table of Contents
Business cards
While this strategy is far from being actually forgotten and businessmen in the Far East hold business cards in almost religious reverence, online business owners seldom walk with business cards in their pockets. This is quite absurd, seeing as how you can just as easily fit a platform icon, a website URL or a social media handle on a business card, as you can a phone number or a physical address.
All in all, business cards are simple, versatile and always welcomed by a recipient. Brochures or flyers can be turned down or frowned upon, while a business card is something that a recipient is more likely to stash into their wallet than to discard or throw away.
Sponsoring local events
The next offline strategy you could use is sponsoring a local event or a local sports team. When you’re self-promoting, people often assume that you’re just hoarding all your money somewhere, only giving back when you absolutely have to.
With sponsored events, teams and organizations, your audience won’t fail to notice that you’re someone who deeply cares about the problems and plights of the local community.
Passively, this also helps you out immensely with networking, especially seeing as how it raises your banner high and allows all like-minded to spot you amongst the crowd. Nonetheless, even sponsoring a local event can give you a different return depending on your skill and prowess. Visit this site the business daily
Get yourself interviewed
Online, you would establish yourself as a person of authority by posting an article on a certain topic or by participating in a Q&A session on a platform like Reddit or Quora. Offline, nonetheless, it’s by far the most efficient to get yourself interviewed for a local television.
This works in several ways, yet, the main subliminal message that it sends is the idea that people behind this television see you as a prominent person within the industry. So, if they assume that your opinion matters and carries weight, why wouldn’t they. This simple form of passive validation more than makes a difference.
Participate in an event
Previously, we’ve mentioned sponsoring a local event, however, what about participating in one. The latter gives you somewhat less maneuvering space, seeing as how it implies that you’ll take place in industry related events which are not that common, at least locally. Nevertheless, you need to keep in mind that this goes both ways.
You see, sponsoring a local event is a plus, seeing as how it’s a nice gesture that no one really expected from you, so it comes off as a nice plus. On the other hand, people who are aware of your business are bound to expect your appearance on a local event and might be let down if you fail to do so.
Just remember to do as much passive promoting as you can with the help of function and event promotion banners, customized stands and similar elements.
Send mail
No one doubts the effectiveness of email marketing, so why not check out of the traditional mail works, as well. First of all, it’s much easier to ignore an unknown message in your inbox than a letter on a pile. Second, opening an actual mail isn’t a real hazard (most of the time), while clicking on an email from an unrecognized source definitely is.
Moreover, while the CTR (click-through rate) of a physical mail may be hard to determine, you can rest assured that once someone goes through the trouble of collecting and opening your mail, they’ll at least take a good look at it. We’re talking about at least skimming through it, if not reading it in its entirety.
A referral program
At the end of the day, you need to understand that just because a referral programmight be a technique that’s used in the digital environment, it’s by no means exclusive to it. A customer can recommend you to a person even in a live conversation.
Nonetheless, unlike in a virtual environment, the process of recognizing a referral won’t be automatic. Therefore, a member of your team needs to inquire about a recommendation or you need to print out a form where a person can make a mention of the recommendation. Either way, with the right amount of effort, this can not only work but yield a great ROI.
In conclusion
In the beginning, when we first started talking about the forgotten marketing strategies, some people might have assumed that this will be a story about marketing in the old days. This, on the other hand, is a tale for historians, due to the fact that the world of marketing no longer exists in its previous form.
If nothing else, digital marketing has forever changed the world of old-school marketing and even if you’re doing everything offline, things are still influenced by the existence of virtual marketing. As soon as you realize this, you’ll start getting a much healthier insight into the forgotten offline marketing strategies.
