Does anyone do any offline marketing such as advertising in newspapers, T-shirts and hats branded with logo, sponsor softball teams or anything else? What have you tried that worked and what was a complete waste of time? Should We not even consider offline advertising?
Hey dcandield I think offline advertising isnt a waste of time. It does work but it all depends on what your website is about and who you are targeting. Well here is a article that may help you with Advertising Offline Well good luck
Works for me Site Tutor anyone else not see the link. Well here it is again anyways Advertising Offline Cheers
I just bookmarked that link. I'm in the middle of starting an offline campaign. Spent the past few days designing some brochures and finding my target audience. I have limited advertising funds but have to start somewhere.
If around 85% of traffic to websites comes from search engines. It means there is not alot of offline traffic to be got. If you are targetting certain things then it works better. Flyers work well for clubs, posters for films + cars etc.. It depends alot on what you are trying to achieve. A flyer for a search engine would probably not convert well
Thats right but every website or business is different and has different needs but if it helps you make another sale the why not consider it. As they say you only get back what you put in!
If you have an e-commerce site, what can definitely work is sending all those who have provided their name and address (i.e., they've ordered from your site before so they are opt-in) a postcard once or twice per year..gently reminding them about your site and any sales, deals you may have going on. Sometimes a postcard is a bit more of a personal touch that folks like.. and it's not expensive to do a mailing like that. -datadugout
Offline advertising is as important as online advertising, in my opinion. At the very least we have to consider the 2 as 1 in some situations. Let me give you an example of this. I am in the printing and advertising business. We run a successful online website that allows users to completely design there own printing needs online..business cards, postcards, stationery, t-shirts etc. You would be amazed the amount of orders we recieve that DO NOT include website URLs or email addresses. Email addresses, I can see in some cases, I cannot understand why certain users overlook this. Seems like a no brainer to me . In my opinion you should have your website URL on each and every printed peice your firm has. In this world of technology and change we need to update frequently. It's a whole lot easier and cost efficient to update your website than 10,000 corporate brochures. My point is marketing online and offline should be done harmonically. Cheers
Silver Surfers - there´s great return in offline advertisers there. There is a huge market of retirees who have time to bugger about on the internet all day, have the interest and patience to research products, the wherewithal to buy on-line but thay prefer to be formally introduced via off-line advertising.
Just like online resources, buying mainstream offline media is all about how best to target your core demographic. For a sport related website, over the last three years I have bought: -Online (you name it, we probably tried it, though search ads had highest ROI by far) -Radio (all per local market, mostly AM talk, some FM trials) -Print (magazines, local rags, newspaper) -Minor-league sponsorships (including a 40' billboard in center-left field) -NCAA Football/Basketball team sponsorships (logo on 250,000 cups, giveaway promotion on the jumbotron, among other things) -Many local Charity Promotions (yes, sponsoring a charity event is advertising) -Gorilla Marketing (hiring attractive waitresses from the local sports bar to dress hot and hand out promotional materials, free hats/shirts, etc during big targeted event where it was too costly for us to legitimately sponsor) -Partnerships (you put my company in your radio/print ad and I'll put yours in mine) The rules are pretty much the same for online, target target target... but the costs are substantially different. In our case, I literally ran out of ways to effectively spend money marketing online. With search and a few sponsorships (after culling online ad spends that were not meeting ROI), I was spending as much money per month as I could online. Thousands of keywords, regional targeting, number one ad result, etc etc... I was giving Google, Overture and other partners as much money as I could in a month… but the volume was relatively small (we’re talking $3k-4k+ per month). A conversion for us (new membership) was $3-$4.50 for this online spend. Had I just been able to wire Google $400k for 100,000 members, I would have. So we began adding $'s to our offline spend (we had already been doing some offline, we just increased it). My comments on each are below: RADIO: For all media, of course, you have to find and target your audience. For us, it was the AM sports radio station (if there was one in that market) followed by the #1 or #2 morning AM talk station. Radio drives volume. I could watch our server logs and new member sign-ups jump just after our radio spot aired. Though expensive, I got the biggest bang for the buck from buying drive-time / rush-hour spots. Also, we had a sports personality with a recognizable voice cut our spots, tailoring each one to the local market. 30s spots were best, though 60s did well too. The freebie 10s and 15s or ‘weather report sponsored by XYZ company’ never really did much for us, but they are cheap. In my experience, all radio ad sales guys have a definite used-car-salesman personality. PRINT: For us, big newspapers did not work. We had best results with local, sports targeted rags and niche magazines. We would do things like include a promotion code for something small/free in the ads, etc. The final verdict is that the print really wasn’t worth it had we actually paid the full cost for the media. As it was, we would cut partnership deals with the local print and include ads/links to them on our site for discounted/free ads in their publications. I would recommend trial runs of small ads before committing to a large spend in print. MINOR LEAGUE SPORTS TEAMS: Fun to do, but not worth it. Take the family to a local minor league baseball game one night… it’s actually a lot of fun. Then go back again then again. You’ll notice a trend… the same core crowd shows up for every event. So, pretty much the 1k or 4k or whatever crowd they draw are the only ones to ever see your ad. NCAA SPORTS: Big bucks, big bang. Each year, we are on 250k+ plastic drink cups, run promotions on the jumbotron and have various other promotions with Georgia Tech. We did a lot of media trade with them each year, so the cost was discounted… but the results (based on ‘how did you hear’ style polls, etc) were very good. Not like online, but good volume and conversions for the price. CHARITIES: Bad for direct conversions for us, good for word-of-mouth and eventual indirect conversions. The ROI would not have been there had we just given $’s. As it was, we usually gave them prizes for giveaways, a couple dozen hats, shirts, mugs, etc depending on the size of the event. These were cheap for us, and the charity organizers were very happy to get all the freebies. Think of things your company may be able to offer in trade to charities or as giveaways for people the charities are trying to attract. This was also a good way to generate new/interesting business leads. GORILLA MARKETING: We would target events where it was just too costly for us to be an actual sponsor. I would hire attractive local sports bar waitresses to hand out promotional materials, hats, shirts etc to people as they parked for the event. You can guess our target market… 30-55 year old men… so the cute girls were a great, um, attraction. Very good ROI. We ran other similar promotions, but always hired attractive girls for the effort. PARTNERSHIPS: I’ll not comment on this one since it is so industry/company specific.
I wish I could afford to do this at one of the major biker rallies like Sturgis or Daytona. I thank everyone who posted on this topic. I have learned a lot. What I have decided is to sell T-shirts customized with my logo and URl. I begin to sell the shirts at a few smaller biker rallies in my area where I can afford the vendor fee. At the biker rallies(as some of you know) they sell a lot of shirts. I am basically just looking to recover my cost of the shirts and vendor fees. I just want to increase the traffic to my forum and I think it could work very well. I also will give out a few shirts to some buddies who ride. Then when they are out riding everyone can see my logo and URL on their back!
Hi. I'm finding this discussion very interesting. Thanks for starting the thread. I personally use CafePress to make a bunch of promotion items for my company. The one I like best is the license plate cover. I put a title / description on the top and my url on the bottom. It looks fantastic on my car. It's great advertising. I also made mousepads and cute pins to hand out for free. And, I created some t-shirts that do not have the company logo and they are selling well online at the company store. I tried print ads a few years ago, but they didn't do well at all. Only got one response. I never considered a radio spot. Do you think people in the car will actually remember a company's url by the time they get home?
This is where a good url comes into play. An easy to remember and spell name would. If you have a site name like www.make-a-quick-buck-riches-etc.com (Just made up this URL)This obviously would be a waste of ad dollars. I think my chopper69 would be an easy name to remember for radio however the Hawgsites would be bad because potential visitors would mispell it. Partypoker is an easy to remember name and I hear that one on the radio all of the time This is an excellent idea I am definitely going to go price this one out. Thank you and everyone else for participating. This is why I love DP!