Online Vs Offline Marketing For The Local Business

posted on Feb 09 by Tim Conley in the Marketing Mindset category

Q: Should I be marketing online or offline?

A: You should be marketing where your prospects are.

If your prospect reads a particular magazine, you should have an ad in it.  If your prospects use Google to find products and services, then you need to rank on the first page for the keywords they input into Google.  Aside: the listing in search engines should be seen as advertising and to get a highly ranked listing you are going to pay with time, money or both.

There shouldn’t be any discussion of whether to use online or offline marketing.  You’ll find that your prospects are to found in both places.  Approximately 70% of people will use the Internet to research a product they buy offline.  That’s a huge opportunity for a local business.

When making your annual marketing plan, you should research where your customers are coming from and to find out this information, you should do a survey.  If you know a larger portion have found you online then you may want to invest more resources toward the marketing that gets the best results.  If you are one of the rare businesses that still gets a lot of customers from the yellow pages, then you should look into ways of maximizing your results.

After your research, you’ll most likely find that 30-50% of your time and budget will go to online marketing and the rest will go towards traditional marketing.

What I find interesting is that many local businesses do almost zero online marketing even though they know they aren’t getting the hundreds or thousands of prospects that are looking for their type of business online.  Some think it’s expensive while at the same time paying $4000 a month for yellow pages ads that get them little to no return.

I had a prospect that thought a $1000 a month quote I gave was expensive yet he was planning to continue spending $3000 a month on radio advertising even though he didn’t know the ROI.  With the work I was proposing, he would know his ROI to the penny.

This year, please plan out your marketing campaigns, find where your prospects are and then market to them.

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