Your marketing strategy as a whole does not exist in a vacuum. When you put out ads in newspapers, put out branded items, hand out flyers, there are several ways to have your physical marketing symbiotically exist with your online marketing. This starts with branding, consistency of message and services, and using physical marketing to drive traffic and search engine ratings.
Use Consistent Branding
Branding is important, and adds to the professionalism of your brand. This means using the same logo for print ads and online ads. For example, if you are a restaurant advertising your Tuesday Happy Hour in newspapers, you also need advertise it with your online marketing. Do not have conflicting pricing or coupons either. These coupons get shared, and having different times or prices reflects poorly in your customer’s opinion of your value.
Have Your Platforms Reference Each Other
There is also a huge opportunity to drive traffic. This starts with the obvious, including links to your social media and website on all of your ads. If you have an overly complicated website link, you can use a URL shortener like bit.ly to use a shortened URL people can type in to link directly to a page about your product or offerings.
This also means on Facebook, using a named link. Facebook pages start with using random combinations of letters and numbers if you do not name the link yourself. So your page may be “Facebook.com/aEx5wP9zL3…” etc. But you can link to Facebook page’s by naming your URL. So for example Facebook.com/Apple leads directly to Apple’s corporate page. But remember, you can only name the URL once. So decide on what you want it to be, and keep it short and sweet.
QR codes are another marketing strategy that has become common. QR codes are essentially barcodes for websites. Almost every smartphone can read them using a QR scanner. You can include the QR image on your ad, which allows people to quickly access your site.
Target Repeat Customers
Driving traffic can also be done by rewarding repeat customers who share your Facebook page or share a post about a special deal on their social media for some kind of discount. You can ask them to share it or like your page without being punished by Google’s ranking services. A cornerstone of effective search engine ranking is also having good Google and Yelp reviews. This does NOT mean that you should pay people to give you rankings or give them a discount for a good review. This does however mean that you should target your repeat customers to ask for reviews. If you have a mailing list, and you can keep track of who uses your coupons or reads your letters, because these people are more likely to have a favorable opinion of your organization or business. These are the people you email them to ask for a review.
You don’t have to choose between online and physical marketing. They can exist symbiotically to make both better.
