Adding Social Media to Your Offline Marketing

Your offline marketing efforts can be given a real boost by integrating it with your social media marketing. We tend to use offline marketing to create brand awareness, advertise to a specific demographic and deliver targeted messages with visual content. Online marketing, however, is all about interacting with consumers, by building relationships and having conversations with them. By combining your online and offline marketing efforts you get the best of both worlds.

Here are some ways to add social media to your offline marketing:

1. Include social media URLs on your business cards

Physical business cards are still as popular as ever, and are shared at networking events, meetings and conferences as much as ever. You can make the most of this by including links to your social media accounts on your business cards along with the rest of your contact information. Try to use short or vanity URLs where possible to make it easier for people to type them into their browser.

Remember that employees’ business cards should have the company social media profiles on them, not personal ones, with some exceptions, e.g. LinkedIn or Plaxo.

2. Offer an incentive to become your friend, fan or follower

Who doesn’t love a freebie? It helps to offer customers and contacts a small gift (e.g. pen, USB key, etc branded with your logo, contact info and social media URLs) if they will connect with you online by becoming a friend, fan or follower. Alternatively you could consider running a competition whereby all new followers or fans are entered into prize draw.

3. Include social URLs on company invoices and receipts

You can make the most of any business stationery by including your social media URLs on your invoices, receipts, etc. Every time you send out a product or invoice this gives people another opportunity to connect with you online. You can also ask customers to review your product or service online by adding a URL on your invoice that allows them to give feedback on a social site.

4. Use QR codes on your marketing brochures and banners

You may have notices QR codes on direct mail pieces, advertisements and posters recently. They are square-shaped bar codes that can be scanned by Smartphone cameras to redirect people to a webpage.

You can generate QR codes with an online QR code creator, such as qrcode.kaywa.com or azonmedia.com/qrcode-generator, and embed the resultant graphic on your own printed marketing materials. It’s an easy way to direct your customers who use Smartphones to your social media profile pages.

Whatever offline marketing you’re involved in, chances are there is some way to integrate it with your social media marketing. Don’t forget that it goes both ways: you can use social media to promote your offline activities as well as vice versa.

If you haven’t already, take a look at my posts about adding social media to your website and email marketing too.