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Written by Jennifer Rogerson
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Friday, 17 September 2010 15:30 |
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Imagine you see a TV advert that grabs your attention, like Compare the Market. You go online and search the company name, and the site appears at the top of the list. You click directly through to the site, and find what you’re looking for.
Or… Imagine you see a product advertised; say, for example, it’s a Dell laptop, on sale at PC World with 10% off. You’re interested in the product, so you go online to find out more. You search the name of the store, the brand name, and details of the offer, but the top search results aren’t what you’re looking for. You try going directly to the store’s website, and spend some time looking for the promotion. It’s not long before you get frustrated, give up and start looking elsewhere.
This is a result of the business failing to integrate their online marketing efforts with their offline promotions. As customers, we’ll get over it. We can always find a similar offer elsewhere. For the business, however, the consequences are more significant. The firm has wasted money on almost-successful marketing: The customer’s interest was captured, but the business made it difficult to find out more, and the customer was lost.
The secret to avoiding this fatal error is integration between online and offline marketing efforts.
Companies that have mastered the art of integration will offer services to customers such as:
- Return an unsuitable online purchase to a store
- Open a bank account in a branch and access it online
- Place an order online, and pick it up from your nearest store if you’re not at home to take delivery
So, to successfully integrate, you should ensure that services you provide offline are available online. This isn’t always appropriate, for example store cards won’t always have an online payment option to encourage you to go back to the store to pay (and buy more!). But if, for some legitimate reason, some of your products or services aren’t available online, tell your customers. This will stop them wasting time searching, and becoming frustrated with your company.
- If you advertise a product offline, make sure these products feature prominently on the homepage of your site. This might be the sole reason the customer visited the site, and they should never have to work to find what they’re looking for.
- Use paid search for products promoted offline. A carefully targeted, and well-planned advertisement will allow customers to see quickly that they’ve found what they’re looking for, and click directly through to the relevant page.
And it‘s not only the customers who benefit. The key advantage of digital marketing is measurability. If you’re conducting a traditional campaign in a targeted fashion and directing it online, the success can be monitored digitally, using campaign specific URLs and key phrases.
Whatever the marketing tools used, they must all be consistent with one another. They must all communicate the same brand message, and if the customer refers to your website for information, they should always be able to find it. Easily.
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