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There are several ways that businesses can boost their customer base and also their visable face to the rest of the world. They need to get involved in business blog marketing. There are several ways you can use a business blog in a marketing campaign and this article is going to cover a few of these things with the offline marketer in mind. ” Reach more people locally: This is one of the main ways your offline marketing will reach a much larger audience, even in your lcoal area. Almost every town or city should have a local merchant’s website that you can get listed on. These sites will let you purchase space to put your local address, phone number, hours of operation and a link to your website if you have one. ” Webpages: The ability of the offline marketer to have a webpage is a very powerful tool. Depending on what kind of business you have this could be your best outlet to reach people. It is very easy and cheap to set up a simple webpage with pictures of your store and inventory, set up an online ordering system, a menu if you are running a restuarant, or any number of other things to make your business really shine to people visting your site. ” Online traffic, becoming offline traffic: Depending on the type of town your business is operating in, your website could end up being your main avenue for bringing traffic to your business. This is especially true in small towns and tourist areas. People are so used to researching trips online that a business without a website is going to lose the business to the store without a website. ” Being able to sell to two markets: Sometimes even the same business in the same niche may deal with more than one micro niche at the same time. You may be selling one type of product in your offline business but being selling a different product online. With the whole other market and customer base you can benefit doubly due to the online customers a website brings in. There are several businesses and services out there that focus on helping people who have no online presence or very little presence. If you are operating an offline business and you are just thinking about starting a webpage, you should not consider it any longer. This is not an expensive marketig option, and will pay for itself in no time at all. All marketers should take advantage of Internet marekting as soon as possible because the future is upon us now and you should not, as an offline business, lose the edge in business and let the future pass you by.

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Companies have and are increasingly moving their marketing budgets to internet marketing and search engine optimisation. The main reason for this is natural progression due to people using the internet more and more every year.



Due to the large increase of broadband users last year and the predicted increase over the next 5-10 years people are taking search engine optimisation and internet marketing more seriously and spending more money on it. The main cause of this is the competition between the big broadband suppliers driving down the price. With more people having fast internet access it allows them to spend more time on the internet going from site to site in minutes seeing dozens of sites. It is also proven that most of the users go through search engines to find their results so it is important to have your site visible there.



Offline marketing is becoming less effective due to several reasons. One of the reasons is the over use of telesales, this has happened over years which has meant that they are less effective now as people are less willing to listen to what the sales person has to offer. People are also purchasing more online so are not going to stores and shops, which means that no matter how much you advertise for a store offline it is losing sales to online websites.



The older more traditional techniques like using leaflets, newspaper advertisements, billboards etc are becoming less affecting due to; people not reading them and reading online newspapers, people not seeing the billboards due to not going near the shops and purchasing online and putting the leaflets straight in the bin with out reading them due to so many irrelevant ones.



As more and more sites go online and the more complex the search engines get, it is harder and harder to rank on the big search engines which also means more time and money has to be put into getting high rankings. However, this pays off as there are more users so you should see more sales for your money. Companies are realising this and concentrating on gaining and not losing trade to online competition.



Search engine optimisation has developed over the years in line with the development of the search engines. This means more research has to be done by the search engine optimisation consultants to allow them to provide the best results for their clients. This can only be done by people investing more money into it and this would only be provided if their where customers to purchase goods and services to make it worth while. So this shows that people are moving their marketing priorities to online.



Some companies split their budget in different ways for their internet marketing and one way is to pay search engine optimisation consultants to deal with it for you. This is affective when using the correct company and you will see results but the problem is there are a lot of con artists also offering the service. The other option is to employ an in house search engine optimisation consultant which will run things from inside the company. A lot of companies have chosen to do this as this allows them to keep control. The problem with this is that the in house consultant may soon get out of date with their techniques if they don’t get enough time to do their research.

In the Internet Marketing community, we are constantly exposed to strategies and tactics to market your product/service online and drive traffic to your web site. I don’t mean to dismiss the value of any of these methods.  In fact we use most of them ourselves.

But, it almost makes you wonder… “How did people ever market before the Internet?” 

That question served as my jumping off point in developing this list. You see, it seems everybody is talking about how to increase your online marketing, but nobody ever talks about what you can do to increase your offline marketing with little or no funds.

So here it is: 7 Tried and true tactics for marketing on the cheap. Online or Off

Tip 1: Make yourself newsworthy

Getting a mention of your company in the right medium can do wonders for your career and your business. How much better do you think a book does when Oprah adds it to her book club?  For that fact, would there even be a Dr. Phil? I can only hope not.

The trick to this one is to make yourself interesting in some way.  Gary Vanderchuck from winelibrary.tv is the perfect example. He’d be the first to tell you that selling wine is not the most newsworthy of topics.  So how did he do it? His over-the-top personality and antics. Selling wine is not entertaining.  Getting Conan Obrien to eat grass and suck rocks on national TV to “prepare his palette” is.

Tip 2: Leveraging other peoples work and money

The Best Story Ever: David pwn3s Goliath – A startup I worked at called eRoom Technology used this tactic against Lotus, a painfully well funded corporation at the time.  eRoom had the better product, but Lotus had the marketing bucks.

Lotus was having a press conference on their new virtual collaboration package at a big industry event in Vegas. They paid handsomely to have all the top reporters flown in and lavished them will luxury perks and gifts. They had slick presentations, great location… the whole nine. eRoom’s stroke of genius was to buy the 4 giant banners that were located directly behind the speakers head (remember this was a an industry conference where they accept advertising sponsors). The next step was to have 100 beanie babies, wearing a tiny eRoom t-shirts, placed on each reporters chair immediately before the conference was to start.

The take away: Every last reporter talked about the eRoom coup as part of their Lotus article. Lotus paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the press conference, eRoom spent less than $5k. Brilliant.

The concept of the Mall is another the perfect example of this tactic in action.  Smaller stores move into a space with bigger “anchor” stores in hopes of enticing walk-by traffic that are headed to the anchor store.  Ever see what happens to a strip-mall when all the anchors leave? Not pretty.

As you can see, this rule does not have to be limited to physical location.  Find a synergistic company (preferably outside your industry, but serving same market) and find a way to piggyback on what they are doing anyway. Could be their location, could be their advertising program, could be their branding, could be their research. Find that angle and work it.

Tip 3: The Identity Kit and Ruthless Branding

The marketing maxim that a person needs to see something 6-7 times before it registers still holds true after all these years. But remember, just because you are on the internet does not mean that it does not apply everywhere.

Create an identity kit including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, fax templates, email signatures, folders. Make sure everything includes your logo, business name, and tagline if you have one. A nifty trick is to also use your logo as your profile picture for message boards and social media sites. A crucially important step is to make sure you are consistent offline and online. Same logo, same fonts, same color palette. When this works well, it will look like your company is EVERYWHERE. Better yet, it’s dirt cheap.

Tip 4: Keep your Customers Happy
 
This should be a no-brainer, but I see it happen time and time again with web-based businesses.  All of the emphasis is put on generating traffic and new leads, while current customers are left to wither and rot.  The truth is that keeping a customer is 5-7 times cheaper (that’s 700% kids) than acquiring a new one. Moreover, the probably of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% whereas to a new prospect it is 5-10% at best. 

What you need to do is put in a customer retention program if one does not already exist.  Communicate with them just as often as new prospects, and give away as much to them as you would to entice a new prospect. Just because it is cheaper to obtain a customer on the internet, does not make that customer worth less. 

Tip 5: Maximize referrals

The IM community is actually starting to make some great progress on this front. However, the problem I am still seeing is that the referrals are still taking place on the prospect side, not the customer side.  Again this ties into rule #4 Keep your customer happy.  For example, you offer a free eBook download and encourage that person to refer 5 friends for an additional bonus.  Until that first person buys something from you they are not a customer, they are still a prospect. 

The critical difference is: When a prospect refers another prospect, you still have to start from square one with the new lead.  When a customer refers a prospect, you have a 50% (yes FIFTY) percent higher chance of making a new sale. 

The take away: Spend AT LEAST as much time creating a referral program for current customers as you do for new leads. 

Tip 6: Form a Joint Venture

The term JV and JV Deal get thrown around a lot on the internet.  In most cases it actually refers to an affiliate program and not a true joint venture. A true Joint Venture is when both you and a partner pony up something to reach a common goal.

For example, say you sell investment real estate. You find that 99% of your customers need to have their property managed after the purchase. What’s the JV no brainer? You guessed it, a property manager. In this case you could form a JV with a property manager to split costs on advertising, office space, technology, or anything else that helps you reach a shared goal. 

Tip 7: Donate your time or stuff

Chances are that you are interested in something outside the internet or business world.  Why not find a way to explore a hobby while helping others and creating some good will towards your business.  The key emphasis on this is subtlety. You don’t want to be doing this only to push your business. Hopefully you should get something out of helping people in-and-of itself.  The goodwill is just a bonus.  Albeit a very strong one. 

A great example I saw recently was a realtor who bought a large passenger van and posted a giant picture of his noggin complete with logo, name, and phone number. He had originally bought the van for his customers use when they bought or sold a house with him (Was perfect for moving locally or when new buyers needed to pick up big things like a fridge, dryer, etc)  . This was a great idea itself.  What made it brilliant is when he read a newspaper article that a free after school program was shutting down because they no longer had the budget to ferry the kids from the school to the rec. center.  So what did he do?  He donated his van between the hours of 3-5 to the center. They did the driving and paid for the gas. As you can imagine he became an instant Rockstar in the community. 

Follow up: I spoke to him a year later. His already successful business was up 400% and he was able to cancel all other lead generation marketing. Genius.

To Download a copy of this article in .pdf format, please visit Evil Genius TV.