The Marketing Maven: Industrial Marketing Blog & B2B Marketing Tips

Integrate Online and Offline Marketing Efforts to Achieve Greater ROI

The Search Engine Marketing Integration Study conducted in April 2008 by iProspect and Jupiter Research revealed that 45% of search engine marketers do not integrate their efforts with offline channels.

The study also showed that larger companies with greater than $50 million in revenue and more than $1 million in their marketing budget integrate offline and online marketing more often than smaller companies do. Lack of budget, human resources, or simply not considering online/offline integration were all cited as contributing factors for lack of integration.

Yet online/offline marketing integration should be considered a mandate — whatever your company size. The more that online and offline marketing efforts are integrated and comprehensive, the greater impact you can achieve in gaining visibility in your market, qualified leads and sales and higher return on your marketing investment.

For example, offline marketing such as direct mail and print advertising can drive prospects online for product research and purchasing. And, in the other direction, many offline purchases are the result of research that customers initially undertake online.

Most prospects gather information about products and services from different sources to build a complete picture. They read an article or see an advertisement in a magazine, they search an online product catalog, they view an online banner. When you create a consistent message and brand experience across all channels, the repetition and reinforcement helps capture and retain a prospect’s attention, increasing your brand awareness and opportunities to gain new customers.

Here are several tips for integrating online and offline marketing:

Best Practices: Online Forms

Most marketers know the benefits of using online forms on Web sites and landing pages to capture leads. Forms offer a fast, easy way to help separate anonymous Web visitors into motivated leads for marketing and sales departments.

In a way, online forms are a toll booth to valuable content. Visitors pay their toll by providing their contact information in exchange for the content they want access to: white papers, executive briefs, Webinar registrations and more.

The main issue with these landing pages is the drop off rate. Faced with a form, some Web visitors are simply unwilling to part with their personal information. That’s okay. It’s all part of the weeding out process, separating prospects from tire kickers. But sometimes an individual who could be a valuable lead drops off because the online form itself or the way it is presented is fraught with problems.

To ensure your online forms are doing all they can to capture qualified prospects for you, follow these best practices.

“Subject” Lines and “From” Lines: A Winning Combination

Are the customers and prospects you’re trying to reach through e-mail marketing missing your message? They might be. It’s not unusual for business users to get hundreds of e-mails each day. With that kind of volume to manage, e-mail users typically scan their inbox looking for e-mails that are important and must be read. How do you make sure yours is one of the important e-mails?