Offline Marketing Techniques That Can Bring In Results
Digital marketing has dominated the marketing sphere over the past decade and a half.
It’s not hard to see why: it’s effective, affordable, and in many ways faster and more trackable than traditional marketing techniques. We’ve discussed the benefits of digital marketing at length, including in our article ‘How to Run a Profitable Digital Marketing Campaign.’
However, digital’s success doesn’t mean that offline or traditional marketing isn’t just as effective. Here are a few offline marketing techniques that can consistently net you great results.
Packaging
Advertisers are well aware of this, but it’s still something that needs to be emphasized: packaging is everything.
In cases where everything else is practically equal between you and your competitor, sometimes effective packaging is the only thing that will motivate a customer to buy your product.Research by Ipsos found that 72% of American consumers say their purchases are motivated by packaging.
The way your product or service is presented can also be a great way to motivate customers to advertise you, without any additional investment on your part. Dotcom Distribution found that 40% of consumers will share an image of your packaging on social media if it’s especially unique, which is a quick and easy way to reel in more customers with minimal effort.
Direct Mail
At first glance, direct mail might not seem like a particularly impressive marketing technique.
After all, what could be so exciting about receiving mail? However, even if direct mail isn’t necessarily trendy, it can yield some of the best results out of any marketing technique, and is a useful tool for many marketing campaigns.
Triadex Services reports that direct mail has seen a 37% increase in response rates since 2015, and is steadily climbing. This, on top of direct mail’s already relatively high ROI, is proof enough of its usefulness in B2B and B2C marketing.
Direct mail can also increase name and brand recall and lengthen the shelf life of your campaigns.
Speaking Engagements
Speaking engagements might not be the first thing you think of when you think about offline marketing, but they’re a surprisingly effective tool. According to the American Marketing Association, thought leadership has become a cornerstone of B2B marketing over the last few decades.
Thought leadership establishes your company as the go-to, reliable resource in your field, and key to this is public speaking. Speaking engagements help reinforce your business’ credibility, and create positive, memorable impressions of your products and services.
Effective speaking engagements can go a long way in improving the image and trustworthiness of your company, while also expanding your network.
Warm Calling
Cold calling has often been dismissed as a time-consuming technique that doesn’t always yield good results.
It does have a more appealing sibling in warm calling, which is a similar technique that pulls in better impressions and ROI. Warm calling is defined by Investopedia as solicitation of a potential customer with whom you’ve had previous contact, perhaps through a direct mail campaign, networking, or other means.
Warm calling is immediately authentic and personalized because of this prior contact. Rather than sending your product or service out into the dark, you are instead reinforcing an already existing connection.
This can be particularly helpful in B2B situations, where it can lead to higher conversion rates and better business relationships.