Promote Your Online Business Using Offline Advertising

When it comes to your online business, how much time do you give offline advertising? The trouble with many internet based businesses is that very little time or thought is spent considering the benefits of advertising in the real world, as well as the digital or virtual one.

Plenty of thought is invested in search engine optimization, reciprocal links, banner advertisements, viral advertising and social networking or blog links, but whilst these are all well and good, they are missing out on the huge impact that offline advertising can create. Although advertising forms which do not rely on the internet are often overlooked, they can have a huge impact, and help reach the target audience extremely effectively.

There are three specific benefits of using real world advertising, or non web based promotion, and these need to be considered carefully.

1. Quick results
Online advertising takes a very long time to really have any effect. Search engine optimization itself can take weeks before any real results are noticeable, and it's never guaranteed. Banner adverts can take a long time to really start to be seen, and as far as building reciprocal links or blogs are concerned, these again take a long time to build up.

Non web based advertising, however, is in many cases instant, or at least, tends to have an impact much sooner. Visiting a local car park, for example, and slipping five hundred flyers under the windscreen wipers of the vehicles there could well result in enquiries. Even if you only have a 1% response rate, that's 5 possible sales leads after just a couple of hours' work. And this can be repeated at various car parks - not forgetting that this is only one advertising method.

Newspaper adverts reach far more people, and at much less time and cost. If a local paper has a circulation of 50,000, that 1% sales lead could potentially be anything up to 500 enquiries!

2. Longevity
Banner adverts rotate, web pages come and go, search results fluctuate. However, sticking a business card in someone's hand, or a flyer under their windscreen, or an advert featured in the local paper every week for a few months helps to create ways in which your advert can be kept. Yes, many people will just throw the paper away, or discard the flyer - but you're not looking to reach every single person - only those who could conceivably be interested in the service or product you're offering.

If your product or service looks even slightly useful, then people are more likely to keep the advert. It could be dropped in a drawer, slid into a wallet or stuck to the fridge, and you may not get any immediate calls, but through offline advertising in this way, you have provided a tangible way in which potential customers can keep your business details to hand. This is in a much easier, less forgettable way than a banner flashing briefly on a web page that most probably was ignored anyway.

3. Effectiveness
For most people, banner adverts don't provide a use or benefit, whereas a mouse mat or a pen does. So why spend time creating banner adverts for your customers when, assuming you have the chance to meet them, or cross paths with them, you could give them an item that they're likely to keep, use, and which has your business details printed on it?

This is of more use and is more advantageous if yours is the kind of business which is likely to find ways of meeting potential customers, rather than seeking them from many and varied locations individually. Trade shows, fairs or conferences can all prove valuable in this regard. Online services such as VistaPrint offer free gifts, or very reasonably priced gifts, which, for a few dollars, you can have emblazoned with your contact details, and distributed to likely customers.

This is a far more effective means of reaching customers, and getting your business name in their head, and of reminding them of that business name almost every day, than flashing banner adverts on random pages on web sites, or hoping that they'll type in the right keywords and happen to click on your site's link.

With careful planning and thought, offline advertising strategies offer a multitude of ways in which you can support the promotion of your online business, and although some of these methods cost money, they are often far more cost effective in the long term, especially when you calculate in your own time spent waiting for search engine optimization or reciprocal linking to have any impact.

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