Offline marketing includes all of the things that you do in the ‘real world’ to promote your business – things like newspaper, television, and radio advertising, signage, participation in community events, sponsoring the local Little League team, hosting in-store events and more. You’ll sometimes hear offline marketing referred to as traditional marketing or old-school marketing.

Offline marketing techniques have a tremendous amount of value, but they sometimes get left out of marketing plans because they’re such a familiar part of day to day operations that they get taken for granted. For best results, you’ll want to be sure that every aspect of your marketing – online and off – is in alignment and reflects your current messaging priorities. Obviously, you’re not going to be changing your billboard every time you update your website! But you do want to review everything you’re doing at least annually to make sure your brand is represented accurately across all platforms.

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Use Digital Marketing to Boost the ROI of Offline Marketing Efforts

To maximize the reach and impact of your offline marketing efforts, use your digital marketing tools. In store events can be promoted via social media and your website, as well as on community event calendars. If you’re participating in a community event, announce your participation online and make sure to share plenty of photos and video on social media. Find out and use any hashtags created by the event organizers to maximize your reach. Take pictures of your signage. If you have a particularly unique or photogenic sign, you can use this as the center of a campaign – invite customers to take pictures with your sign or to share their own artistic interpretation of your sign. If you’ve got an aesthetically pleasing image of your signage or business exterior, put it on Instagram!

Use Offline Marketing to Boost the ROI of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Traditional marketing tools can be used to let your customers know you’re providing entertaining content, product information, and savings opportunities online. Including website information and social media links in print and other forms of advertising is pretty standard practice. Drive traffic to specific product or policy pages with signage in store; you can also use signage to prompt shoppers to opt into text messaging or email campaigns. Make the most of little opportunities. When you’re sponsoring the Little League team, make sure the t-shirt designs include your website or Facebook address – and invite the team parents to tag your business each and every time they post a pic of the kids in action. A strategic approach to promoting your business using both online and offline tools can help you realize greater value from both.