With every successful product comes an equally successful marketing campaign. After all, many customer’s first interactions with a brand or a company are through their ad campaigns. The importance of good marketing for a business to succeed cannot be underestimated: it’s what makes people interested in your product, and it’s what gets people to enter your business’ doors.
Many people might assume that a start-up company would be better off focusing their efforts on better machines to make business operations more efficient or working their books to allow for a mortgage loan or refinancing. While these are all valid ideas, marketing and advertisement remain valuable assets to any company. Be it online or offline marketing, the effort poured into getting your brand out there will add a lot to your business.
But the world we live in now is multi-faceted. Our life and attention do not only revolve in the physical world but also a virtual one. We spend as much time online as we do offline. Keeping this in mind, companies have to put in more effort in formulating an ad campaign that takes both facets into account. Below are some tips for start-up companies planning to run both an online and offline marketing campaign.
Offline Marketing
Direct Mail Still Works
Back before the Internet was a major force, smaller companies without the money for a TV advert or a billboard primarily relied on direct mail advertising to put their name out. Interestingly enough, even with the prevalence of the Internet nowadays, direct mail advertising is still a dependable form of advertisement. Most people go through what physical mail they receive, making direct mail a good way to connect to your customers personally.
Business Cards and Trade Shows
Bringing your business to a trade show is an effective method of creating potential business partners and letting a community know your business. Take this opportunity to introduce yourself to other business contemporaries and the business reviewers that often come to these types of events. Don’t forget to bring a business card: even in these times, having a business card will help you create connections and better increase the chances of expanding your reach.
Pamphlets and Coupons
Walking through any shopping mall often includes receiving flyers and pamphlets from the businesses that line the mall. While this method seems crude and archaic, there’s no denying that human curiosity is strong and something that can play to the advantage of businesses everywhere. Including discount coupons in pamphlets increases the chances of engagement, as it provides clients an initiative to try out your service.
Join Local Events and Engage Your Community
Besides trade shows, local events and gatherings are another great way to increase visibility and recognition. It’s also a gold mine of potential customers and clients. Offering sponsorship for your local events is a great way to organically introduce your business into your community. Although local events don’t come often, take advantage of the opportunity when there is one.
Online Marketing
Study Your Analytics
One of the key benefits of online marketing is that you can immediately see a visual representation of your statistics and data. This allows you to look at what method works and what doesn’t, enabling you to replicate success and avoid failure. Studying your analytics over time will let you know whether your marketing campaign is successful or not, providing valuable insight into what to do next.
Create Interesting Content, Not Just Ads
Nobody likes seeing inane ads that showcase the product. Many people who lived through the TV era fondly remember interesting commercials and the products that they advertised. Even with the change in format, the same rule still applies: creating interesting content that will trigger the viewer’s curiosity. This will generate interest and can turn more leads into actual customers.
Find Your Social Media Platform
There’s a litany of different social media platforms, each with its own demographic. For a business to successfully leverage social media for its marketing campaign, one must know what its audience is like. Knowing the target demographic and what websites they frequent will make the marketing effort more cost-efficient. Focusing the efforts on a social media platform used by many of a business’s target demographic is a wise financial and advertising move as you’re limiting your efforts into a platform that is most likely to yield results.
Have a Goal or a Benchmark
As mentioned before, one of the great positives of online marketing is access to the statistics of your campaign. You can use these statistics and create a goal or benchmark: for example, having a certain amount of likes and engagements at the end of a month. This, in turn, will help create a sense of direction for your campaign.
