Part 1: Online Vs Offline Marketing Techniques

16 November, 2011

This is the first part of the series “How can I promote my website”.

When you’re setting up a new business, the launch of your website is a landmark moment. You will already have named your business and registered your company name. You will have made decisions about your branding and identity, as well as your products and services and how you want them to be described. All of this has fed into your website design. And more than likely you’ve been waiting until the site is live before sending out those flyers and business cards with the new URL on them.

So the site is now live and you have cause for celebration!

But wait one moment…

All of this is useless if your website can’t be found by anyone. To ensure that potential customers can find your website and click through to it, you will carry out a number of online and offline marketing activities to promote a website and make it easy to find. There are many ways in which this can be done.

Over the next few weeks, I will be exploring in detail each of the different digital marketing techniques that you can use to help promote a website.

We’re going to begin with a comparison between online and offline marketing techniques for promoting a website. Then from next week, we will begin looking at digital marketing techniques, starting with email marketing, and moving on to conversion optimisation, SEO, PPC etc.

Offline Vs Online Marketing Activities

Printing flyers and taking out advertisements are often the first marketing activities that people think of for website promotion. They don’t require any technical expertise and are established traditional marketing methods.

But designing, printing and distributing flyers, or taking our paid advertisements, can be very expensive methods of promoting a website. To begin with, you require the services of a designer. For flyers, you need to pay a printer and a distribution company, and for advertisements, you need to pay for placement. The process can be lengthy and inflexible, and the resulting items – which will only be seen by a limited number of people – cannot be changed once produced.

In contrast, digital marketing for website promotion can be done for a much smaller campaign cost (with no print or delivery charges). Changes can be made immediately, notifications sent out to a vast number of people, and errors can be corrected as soon as they are identified. Digital or online marketing has many advantages over offline, including immediacy, automated measurement, (often) lower production and delivery costs, and a much wider potential audience (anyone who uses the internet).

Digital marketing campaigns can be highly personalised, by integrating customer contact details and using their purchase history to tailor the content that they see. The cost of printing personalised promotional materials would be comparably prohibitive.

If you want to discuss options for digital marketing campaigns, just give me a call on 01133 20 21 21 and I will be happy to talk you through what’s possible. For some ideas and inspiration, have a look at what I’ve done for previous clients by visiting my portfolio.

Online Vs Offline Networking

Networking is an excellent way of building trust, so for high value services where trust is vital, networking can be very important. But you can only ever meet a limited number of people in person, and as your time is your most valuable asset, you need to assess whether the investment will generate enough leads to justify the expense.

Networking can be done digitally through social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Google+ for a much smaller investment in time and cost. I have run a number of bespoke training sessions for clients who want to ensure their employees are equipped to utilise the opportunities offered by social media, whilst avoiding the pitfalls. To find out about social media training for business, just give me a call on 0113 320 21 21.

Next week, we are going to look in detail at Email Marketing as a Website Promotion tool.