Offline Businesses – 4 Ways To Use The Internet To Market Offline Businesses

Offline Businesses – 4 Ways To Use The Internet To Market Offline Businesses

© Doug Champigny, http://info-at-this.com/offline-businesses/
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Offline business owners are starting to realize that marketing offline businesses on the Internet is the most cost-efficient component in their marketing mix. Unlike traditional advertising, online marketing is interactive, allowing for better customer relations, more effective lead targeting and better damage control when needed. Offline businesses can increase sales, boost their bottom line and brand their company and products for much less money with online marketing as well.

Offline businesses usually start with a company website when first venturing into online promotion, as it’s the most familiar territory for them. A website is the online version of their offline catalogue or brochure, so they feel relatively comfortable in using that as their main promotional vehicle online. While this can definitely help any offline business establish a web presence, it isn’t the only way, nor even necessarily the best way to market themselves online.

The second way to use the Internet to promote offline businesses can often be more effective, because building a business blog is easier and usually more a more powerful weapon to have in your marketing mix. Blogs are easy to update, can be authored by any company employee, have greater presence in the search engines and other directories, and can be built by the company itself, instead of relying on expensive web design firms or advertising agencies. Plus, updates are instant – and any marketing pro worth his salt knows the advantages of being first to market with new products or services. With a business blog, offline businesses can be promoting a product for a week or two while their competition is still waiting for the ad agency or design company to update a website.

Email based marketing is another way to use the Internet for promotional and advertising purposes, and offline businesses would be wise to train one or more of their staff in the art of marketing with email. This is easier for larger corporations since they usually already have someone issuing a print newsletter – but any company, even a sole proprietorship, can issue a professional-looking business ezine that’s cheaper to produce, cheaper to send and far ‘greener’ than a printed newsletter.

The fourth way to use the Internet to market offline businesses is through social media sites like FaceBook and Twitter. Social media is the fastest growing segment of the online world and rapidly becoming the most important part for online marketers of any stripe – FaceBook alone has over 400 MILLION users now, a sizable market no matter what line you’re in. And recent demographics from such sites is enough to make any marketer salivate – far from being kid-dominated as originally believed, these sites are mostly populated by those 30-70 of above average income and education. Definitely NOT a market that should be ignored when using the Internet to market offline businesses!

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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Offline Businesses – 5 Reasons Independent Retailers Should Be Online

Offline Businesses – 5 Reasons Independent Retailers Should Be Online

© Doug Champigny, http://info-at-this.com/offline-businesses/
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Retail marketing practices favor the big, powerful retailers to the extent that most independent retailers struggle constantly to keep their businesses alive. But also having an online retail store can make a big difference to the bottom line of any independent retail marketing operation.

First, fewer and fewer retail marketing customers are using telephone directories or local media to source products they want. With major search engines now filtering search results based on the user’s location, local businesses are likely to attract more customers into their offline businesses through advertising their products online.

Next, increased sales volume means increased purchasing power – and every independent retail marketing owner or manager knows the disadvantage they’re at due to the purchasing power of larger retail giants. How much better would your margin be if you were buying 2 or 3 times as much of any of your lines? How much more co-op advertising funds would be available? How much would it reduce your cost-per-item-sold from your physical location and staff if your turnover doubled or tripled?

Then there’s the number of items you can sell – obviously in offline retail marketing this is limited by physical space and budget. But online stores don’t have the physical limitations that offline businesses do, and you don’t need to purchase the product in advance of the sale – being able to order it for overnight or 2-day delivery to you is sufficient for online sales. All you need is a photo and description of the item, as long as you know the wholesale supplier is dependable. Online, your inventory is limited only to what products and product lines you have access to, not just those in your physical store.

Fourth, an online presence makes it easy for you to establish a list of leads to start email marketing to, and you can ask your existing retail customers if they’d like to receive your email blasts as well. Regular contact, e-coupons and specials and notices of new products available helps your customer retention, keeps you top-of-mind for the consumers and can once more boost your bottom line.

And, perhaps most importantly, your online retail store will allow you to recruit affiliates to help sell your products as well. Affiliate marketing is huge online, and can best be compared to independent commissioned agents in the offline world. But while offline businesses like an independent retail marketing operation would be very hard pressed to find someone to represent their products on commission only, the online world is full of site owners, bloggers and email marketers looking for products to promote on a straight cost-per-sale commission structure. And since you only pay affiliates once the sale is made, there’s little upfront cost to using affiliates other than your affiliate program itself.

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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Why Offline Businesses Need An Online Presence

Why Offline Businesses Need An Online Presence

© Doug Champigny, http://info-at-this.com/offline-businesses/
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

When the World Wide Web debuted in 1994, it was the first graphical interface for accessing the Internet for most people, and all the rules changed. From it’s inception as ARPANet in 1963, the Internet had been text-based and accessible only to those who knew the UNIX commands necessary to navigate the various online servers. For offline businesses, the biggest change was that online marketing was now allowed – commercial activities had been pretty much taboo until then.

For the first few years only the most avant-garde of the business world embraced the Internet, and for the most part offline businesses just didn’t understand it well enough to get more than slightly involved. But as with every new technology, offline businesses started to see friends and competitors doing well with it, customers started asking if they had an online presence, and soon more and more were getting into online marketing in one form or another.

Over a decade later, the World Wide Web is still gaining in popularity, still growing exponentially, and has in fact become an almost mandatory marketing medium for large and small business entrepreneurs, merchants and corporations. From realtors to arms manufacturers and from herbalists to governments, the Internet has become one of the, if not the, most powerful advertising and marketing vehicle in history. For that reason alone, offline businesses MUST have an online presence to maintain their status quo, and especially to build market share or market area.

But the growth to billions, possibly trillions of dollars spent in online marketing today has also mean a drop in spending at the traditional offline media – newspapers are in desperate times, radio and TV stations are going under in the US alone at a rate of about 1 per week. Reports showing consumers spending less time reading newspapers and magazines, watching less television and listening less to radios in favor of time online are coming out regularly, and as the market base erodes for each of these media, so does the response to advertising in those vehicles. It’s become a vicious downward spiral for offline media, one many or most won’t survive.

And that’s the core issue when offline businesses consider going online – the buying public is spending more and more time there, spending more and more of their money there, and doing their consumer research there before heading out to source something locally. If you don’t have a good, solid presence online, how can you be expected to show up in their research? Whether it’s a purchasing department looking to place contracts for hundreds of millions or a hungry consumer looking for an exotic restaurant in their town, if they don’t see you they won’t know you exist. Think about it – when was the last time YOU looked anything up in the yellow pages?

One caveat – it’s easy for offline businesses to sink tens of thousands of dollars into fancy web sites and the like and not see much, if any, return for their money. Beware of design services providers who use recent graduates conversant in all the latest technologies but devoid of any marketing experience. You wouldn’t send a recent graduate with no business experience to call on your top clients, so avoid making that same mistake as you bring your offline business online!

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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Online Marketing Tips For Small Offline Businesses

Online Marketing Tips For Small Offline Businesses

© Doug Champigny, http://info-at-this.com/offline-businesses/
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Offline businesses, especially small offline businesses, can learn a lot about how to market a business online from studying the Internet marketing professionals who use the Internet to market their online businesses every day. Let’s take a look at a few online marketing tips for small offline businesses to help you get rolling…

First up, considering using a blog as the main online presence for your small business instead of a static website. Not only are they easier to set up, faster to publish and far more effective in most cases for search engine optimization, but your small business blogs can be updated by anyone who can type, with no programming or coding knowledge required.

Secondly, begin building a targeted list of leads right from day one – use a professional online autoresponder company to build opt-in lists. Every reputable autoresponder company provides information on how to use their service to build your leads and contact them, and there are plenty of additional email marketing strategies available for free on Internet marketing blogs around the Internet.

Thirdly, use as many of the free online marketing opportunities as your time permits to market your small offline businesses. Social media sites like FaceBook allow you to host free pages about your business, social networking sites like LinkedIn let you take your business networking to new levels, connecting with new prospects, suppliers and colleagues, and Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, HubPages and Google knol encourage you to write information your prospects would find interesting and informative and include links to your small business blogs, social media pages, etc.

Fourth, be sure to track your results from every form of online promotion you’re using in your marketing mix. While each of these marketing tips is free or very inexpensive to implement, they each do take some of your time – and time is usually the commodity in least supply for owners and operators of small offline businesses. By tracking your results you can be constantly refining your online marketing strategies so that your time is used solely on those techniques that benefit your particular small offline businesses the most.

And fifth, don’t just use these online marketing tips. Use these are your basic starting point, but then learn everything you can about online marketing and promoting small offline businesses online, and use that new knowledge to continue to build your online presence and extend your impact online. Who knows, soon you might be using these same online marketing tactics to promote your large offline businesses!

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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How An Online Presence Helps Offline Businesses

How An Online Presence Helps Offline Businesses

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://info-at-this.com/offline-businesses/
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

An online presence can take many forms – websites, blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, social media pages, business networking sites, etc. – and each of these can help offline businesses in a variety of ways.

For example, look at the ‘About Us’ page on most blogs and corporate websites. Potential customers often read this information to know more about your company before doing business with you for the first time. Yet where in the offline world is your business history, special qualifications, experience and/or educational credentials available to potential customers?

Offline businesses that manufacture appliances, industrial machinery, even software programs can demonstrate the new features of their existing products, innovations in new products or highlight the ease-of-use in their line using online videos. How hard would it be to demonstrate the same to potential customers and targeted leads living hundreds or thousands of miles away using offline technologies?

The how-to market is another area where offline companies can clean up online. A wool company can show how the stitches in a complicated pattern are knitted and the beautiful sweater that results, then end with a pitch for the pattern free when the consumer purchases the required wool through that offer.

But not all issues are easily solved through online videos or audios. Perhaps yours is one of the offline businesses that manufactures or distributes highly technical, specialized equipment for hospitals, optometrists or dentists. After-sale service can easily include great customer care if the medical practitioner knows they can ask you a question on Twitter or FaceBook and receive an almost-instant reply. And what would that do for your customer retention and satisfaction?

An online presence helps offline businesses in areas beyond marketing and customer management too. For example, if an unknown supplier has a product that’s a perfect fit for your existing clientele or can get you products you’re already using at a price below what you’re currently paying, wouldn’t you want their marketing department to find you online and contact you?

And you can probably think of a number of ways having an online presence could help the human resources departments of offline businesses; even the smallest of companies could benefit from an online page encouraging qualified applicants to submit a resume online. With a collection of resumes from qualified applicants on hand at all times, would you need to pay to advertise job openings? And how long would it take to fill a vacancy if you had already pre-qualified the applicants before the position came open?

The truth is almost every department or area of operation in offline companies, big or small, can benefit from an online presence. Brainstorm with your department heads, customers, suppliers, colleagues or friends as best suits the size of your business and see how many ways you can find to benefit your particular business through it’s online presence.

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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