Blending offline and online promotions is important when it comes to running a business and advertising it successfully. There are key mistakes that are often made and worth avoiding where possible.
From ignoring your existing customers to forgetting to use trackable elements, these are all very much influential to your company’s success online and offline.
In this guide, we’ll cover seven mistakes to avoid so that your business can hopefully thrive in both mediums this year.
1. Inconsistent branding and messaging
Brand and messaging are important to stay consistent with. For users who are just coming across your brand, it takes five impressions for them to recognize you. Not only that, but it takes many more interactions – 27 in fact – to trust your brand.
That’s why you must be consistent with branding and messaging for your business, both online and offline.
Your store’s look and tone shouldn’t be one that’s clashing with other aspects of your business like your website or social media. Ideally, you want ever singular interaction that a user has with your brand, to be recognized instantly by the user. It’s this consistency that really makes a different to the success of any branding or marketing materials and it’s messaging.
2. No unified strategy
It’s imperative that you have thought about strategy when it comes to advertising. If you just try to run a random ad, then you’re likely to find it doesn’t always hit the mark.
Ensure online and offline efforts are serving a common goal and that you’ve looked at the customers in particular to see what they want. A comprehensive understanding of your target audience and translating that into effective copy or brand advertising in general, is what will help convert more of the prospective leads into paying customers.
Not having a unified stratregy will mean all that time and energy, as well as money for ad spend will likely be wasted or not return the best investment as opposed to opportunities where strategizing and research has been done.
It’s also helpful to do this so that customers can be guided from one platform to another with ease.
3. Poor online-to-offline experience
It’s important that the experience your customer has online is something that’s translated to your offline environments too and vice versa.
For example, if you’ve got some flawless online reviews but the in-store experience has been rated terrible, then this is a failure that needs fixing.
Your offline service must match your digital services and vice versa, otherwise that can be an inconsistency that’s reported only by disgruntled customers at either end. If this is happening, it’s good to take stock of what’s going on and how it can be fixed so that it doesn’t continue to compromise the efforts being made for the business in general.
4. Ignoring cross-channel journeys
As a business, chances are, you’re existing on multiple channels rather than just the one. It’s helpful that your exploring the option of cross-channel journey so that customers aren’t having to work hard in order to connect the dots.
If you’re advertising online, then make it easy for your customers to find you in-store and vice versa. Each channel can do well in promoting the other and when it comes to multiple online channels, these are all worth cross-promoting to help reach different audiences across the platforms.
You never know what additional potential there might be if you’re willing to do a bit more in the way of marketing and cross-channel linking. For offline cross-channel journeys, ensure your in-person store experience matches to literature you’re perhaps mailing through people’s doors.
For example, you could look at using Aura Print to create leaflets and brochures which can advertise your in-store contact details or your online socials and website. There are may ways in which you can keep everything connected.
5. Lack of tracking
Tacking is definitely something that’s necessary in order to see if your offline adds are driving traffic and sales online.
You can do it somewhat easily with online advertising but many businesses often neglect to do it for the offline promotions too. You could actually be getting a lot more in the way of activity from people offline visiting your website or socials on the internet.
With that being said, trackable links, codes, or numbers on print materials will help you decipher where your audience are coming from and what enabled them to reach that point where they’re online and perhaps buying something as a result.
6. Forgetting existing customers
Every customer is important, whether they’ve been with you from the beginning to those that have just signed up to your email list and have yet to buy anything.
While a lot of businesses spend a great deal of effort on acquiring new customers, not all of them are focusing on new leads. Your loyal online and offline customers, also need to be remembered and appreciated in whatever way possible.
So if you’re providing new promotions for prospective leads, don’t forget to treat the old customers with something equally beneficial too. It’s not just about the singular transactions anymore. A sign of a good business is one where it’s customers are always returning again and again.
7. Tracking channels separately
Finally, one of the mistakes that many businesses often make is by tracking channels separately. It’s always beneficial to think of your channels as a collective, whether it’s your physical store and website, to your social media profiles.
While these are all different parts of the business and are all operating in their different, unique ways, they all contribute to the same customer journey.
Tracking your channels all in one place is a much more productive use of your time than trying to do it all individually. There are also plenty of great platforms in which you can monitor each channel performance and make adjustments as and where necessary.
These common mistakes are worth avoiding when you come to blend both your online and offline customer promotions together. Make use of these tips and maximize both to your advantage to further boost your busines and brand success.
