When I say 'make the most of your offline presence', I'm talking about a wide range of potential online benefits: increasing traffic, improving your link profile and/or increasing conversion rates. Optimising this crossover proves the old adage, 'the sum of the parts is greater than the whole' (oh, that old adage).
First off, let's talk about why it's a good idea to make the most of this crossover.
- If someone likes your brand offline, they're probably going to like it online. Make sure your website is a pleasant user experience and has lots of opportunities for your customers to tell their friends about you.
- Unless you live just down the road from all your customers, it's easier to communicate online that it is offline. It's also often a lot more time-efficient.
- An online customer is much more likely to give valuable feedback on your brand than an offline one, particularly if you make it easy for them. This kind of interaction can take any number of guises: a form to fill in, commenting, voting, linking.
- Converting offline customers to online customers can, depending on your business, significantly lower the overhead on any conversions you make.
- At the risk of sounding obviously biased, online is where it's at. These days, customers almost expect a comprehensive web presence from whoever they spend money with. Don't fluff it up.
How to send people to your site
I remember the first time a friend of mine put his website on his business card. It was pretty exciting. These days, you'd attract more attention not having a readily-available web address for your company. You have to do something more engaging, more... (you guessed it), 2.0. So here are three tips on how to direct customers, potential or otherwise, to your site:
- Incentivise. Give your offline customers a proper good reason to visit your site. A competition for 'best feedback' is a good idea. Or, for some great buzz, organise a giveaway at a certain time on a certain day (but make sure your site lives up to expectations under the sudden influx of open-minded visitors or they might not be so open-minded next time).
- Be provocative. If you've got the space in which you can be provocative, then ask a question that demands an answer from your user. This has to be done carefully; you don't want to be the target of any passionate arguments, but it would be perfect if you could provide the space in which that argument took place.
- Offer exclusivity. The oldest trick in the book: 'Visit our website for a special, one time only, exclusive deal!'. You don't have to be that blatant, but spreading the word that you might get a better deal or service if you come via the web will convert well. Again, a little tricky to implement: you don't want to ostracise any customers you do have that don't like or use the Internet much.
- Community. If your customers like buying cars, they probably like talking about them. Building online communities is a whole other ball game, but there's lot of merit in driving genuine, interesting customers to your website.
Offline Advertising
Google Call to Action
There have been a few companies that have used Google call-to-actions in their advertising campaigns. Here's a successful example from way back in 2006. As Paul Mead writes, a Google campaign is “better in terms of recall and it fits in with the way we react to advertising these days.” The danger of course is that your campaign can be hijacked spectacularly.
Or, like with this Samsung ad in the Metro today, you can just fail. If you're going to get customers to search for you, at least have something they can find! (Sorry the quality's not that great- if you can't read it, the Samsung ad tells me to 'Search on Google for LED').
Brand
If you're starting a new business or thinking about changing the name of your existing one, it's really worth thinking about what people will be googling when they want to find you. Either a memorable and unique brand name or, depending on your online clout, a keyphrase-laden name are much better than, for example, 'Trixy's MEGA Supersaver Store'; who's going to remember that?
How to boost your online efforts offline.
Say you're doing some linkbait or have just launched a new feature on your site- why not promote it offline as well? If you can get a TV, radio or print mention, you could drive a whole load of unique traffic to your site. Just be careful of making a social media fluff, like Radio 4 did recently with their self-proclaimed 'viral video'. The content was great, but there was some dispute over whether you can call a video viral while giving it a boost on the show.
When The Hoards Start Arriving
Golden Rule: make sure you're ready for them. Nothing is going to put a customer off a brand more quickly than being urged to visit a site only to find it's not up to scratch.
If you've been smart and used a custom URL shortener like Tom suggested last week, then you can track your customer and drive them to exactly the right page. If you haven't got around to that yet, think about how you'll get the right message to the right customers when they arrive at your site.
One tip is to make sure your offline prompt aligns with the online equivalent. You could use the same language or the same imagery- anything that will reassure the user that they're in the right place. Stick a big call-to-action in there and you're away.
You want your customers to arrive at the page you're directing them to and feel like they've turned up half way through a whoop-ass party. If possible, make sure there's already some buzzing comments and interaction going on. If you're a well known name, consider making a regular appearance in the comments. The personal touch is another nice way to overlap your offline and online efforts; create an avatar that people will recognise and want to connect with.
How else do you use your offline presence to benefit your online presence?
Good ideas, thanks Lucy, I've seen an increase in clients offering discounts to users of their website.
Have you noticed some movie ads on TV don't give a web address they just give keywords to search? it's a new ide, I don't really understand the benefits - just give me a URL.
I agree, this whole "search for xxx on Google" thing is bizarre. As an accountable marketeer i'd be very interested to know the reasoning behind doing this to providing a URL, i'm sure there is one.
It does catch your attention more than a URL so i guess that must be why. Plus there does seem to be a bit of ego involved - "this is how good we really are at SEO."
I wonder if i created an ad that said "Search for XXX on Microsoft Live Search" it would have the same impact?!
Don't really see how it's hard to understand to be honest, Lucy even quoted a reasoning why it makes sense:
"As Paul Mead writes, a Google campaign is “better in terms of recall and it fits in with the way we react to advertising these days.”"
If you saw an advert for, say, Watchmen (I recall them doing the whole "search for watchmen" thing), if you wanted to find out more online, would you go straight to the address bar to type in a URL or would you hit the search box with "watchmen"? I know I do the latter all the time.
I think the web serves a different purpose for movies anyway. Official websites for movies aren't all that important (in my opinion anyway), what is important is getting people excited about the movie and getting them to make the decision to go and see it when they can. The method of doing this is simply getting them thinking about the movie, viewing clips, reading comments etc. All of which don't have to (and usually don't) take place on or as a result of the official website.
For a movie, bad reviews get out pretty easily anyway (tv, newspapers, magazines etc) so encouraging people to search simply for the name is no biggy even if they end up on a bad review. I never base whether I go to see something in the cinema on the opinion of reviews anyway, let alone the opinions of random folk online. I do however get interested in a movie if I can view clips that make it look good and hear some interesting information about it.
Obviously it makes it a more difficult task to measure (other than looking at the amount of searches for the term you provide), but at the end of the day success for movie marketing is ultimately determined by box office figures and not traffic to the website.
Just my (quickly considered) opinion.
I didn't know about the Samsung and the Orange mishaps. Not things one would expect from such big companies! I liked the post, a good reminder of how the online world is not a seperate virtual world but it is very much part of the 'offline' world (or perhaps vice versa!). The two are closely interconnected, one is a continuation of the other.
Nice post!
What if the cunning idea behind the campaign was to fail for the labelled term but rank for the obvious second search "LED tv"? Very web 2.0 thinking huh?! ;)
Afterall, look at the amount of discussion here about the campaign alone, followed by the number of times people have posted the samsung site URL (yes they aren't links but one could assume that in blog posts and elsewhere, they might be?).
Obviously this wouldn't be the most sensible way of doing things, and it clearly wasn't intended, but at the same time, the discussion about samsung LED tv's that will be going on online amongst marketers and SEO's must be buzzing at the moment - not a total fail really.
Just another angle for discussion.
EDIT - Forgot to say, great post Lucy!
Currently I'm facing the task to launch a new eCommerce site for a client, who wants to use also radio advertising for some reason.
Although this post and all the comments are quite useful in shaping a better picture for this task, I'm still concerned about promoting an URL via radio ads.
Also, promoting the site with "search for ...on Google" might not be a sufficient idea here in this case, since the site is totally new with no organic ranking and the competition for Adsense is insanely high.
Any thoughts or experiences with radio advertising for websites here with my fellow colleagues? BTW, if somebody is interested in some results of the campaign, I can share some insights in a few weeks after this campaign has launched...
What's the URL like?
If it's awkward and/or lengthy then you could consider getting a custom URL shortener like I mention in the post.
If it's unique but memorable then maybe you should focus on getting the site to rank for a brand name search.
What's the brand name like? Surely it wouldn't be hard to get them ranking top for it and simply, as Lucy suggests, encourage a search for it?
Thanks for your advice. The brand name might not work so perfect because of two things:
a) This is 100% focused on the german market, but the brand name includes an english language portion. And we expect 50% of the german audience typing into Google Search some "germenglish" - phonetically describing what they understood, not what the brandname really is.
In this context the "compare the meerkat / compare the market" campaign is quite interesting, but I'm not sure yet how to apply something similar to this campaign.
b) Also to make it more nightmarish the brand name includes a portion which is used as an abbreviation of a hugely successful online game (without disclosing too much: it is a three-lettered english expression of surprise). That's why we face a fierce adsense/domain name competition from everything targeted at this particular online gaming audience.
So I will consider the URL shortener advise as maybe the most applicable option.
Again, thanks for your feedback!
The Samsung ad on LED cracked me up. Good article. Also, before customers arrive at your site, make sure to implement web analytics so that you can start your behaviour analysis ASAP.
Great article. The best technique is the one that uses a combination of ways to attract users. Here at Physician Designs we discuss options for different techniques with our clients - combing billboard marketing with their website, SEO, radio, print media, etc.
This is very interesting, thus far we've been able to promote our medical website design services without any offline promotions. But may it's something we should look into.
The Samsung advert kind of reminds me of the Orange adverts in the UK late last year. Orange are a cellphone company in the UK incase you were unaware.
Basically they ran offline, TV, Radio ads, in a mass media blitz for about a month, with the strapline "search online for I am"
Upon searching for the term "i am" on google.co.uk they were nowhere to be found in the organic serps, considering they no doubt invested millions into the campaign, quite why they never went for the #1 slot in organic baffles me.
Essentially they were paying for their traffic twice, once for the offline campaign and then again for every click through PPC.
Their agency(ies) should have been sacked!
I think the samsung one is worse than that though because they're asking you to search for a phrase which all their compeitors rank for... At least with orange no other phone company ranked for "i am"
valid point, BUT anyone with any nouse could have ranked #1 for it in a few days, as its a totally un-optimized search term.
If I were Vodafone, o2, or any of the other myriad of mobile networks, you can bet I would have been optimizing accordingly.
Poor reflection on their online agencies as well if you ask me...
I don't think that's fair - the number one site was "I am bored" which would have been quite tricky to out-rank I think. I agree more could have been capitalised on from the other agencies but frankly I'm not sure the search volume it drove via the keyphrase was that high so I don't think there was that much benefit in ranking 2-5...
I wrote a blog post about the Orange 'mishap' last year (https://www.chewie.co.uk/seosem/orange-want-you-to-search-for-i-am/) it's a poor sign about the quality of an agency when things like this happen, but like Tom_C said, it's worse in this instance because competitors are actually ranking for the term Samsung are telling you to search for.
Martin,
Must have been very funny :)
They investing the money on promotion and some other site getting the traffic.
This exposes the gap in the working mindset of different departments of an organization.
Gaurav
Great case study here. It's interesting to see some of the larger companies doing it, though they may have failed. =P
I can't believe that - great example of what NOT to do. Seems like there was very little forethought on the behalf of the advertising staff.
Maybe it was a typo? If you do a Google search for "LED tv" the first result is www.samsung.com/us/productsubtype/led/.
First paid result - the "Sponsored Link" - at the top of results is for samsung.com/led.
When I search for LED I do get a Google News result at the verrry bottom of the results -Samsung Launches LED TV Range.
Typo or not - that's a shame. I'm glad I'm not working on the team responsible for that epic fail.
Great post Lucy, thuogh I have to say that I hate it at the same time. I actually saw the Metro/Samsunbg ad on the train home on Friday and started writing a post about what a major fail it is. The sunshine over the weekend meant that I was planning to finish it off today. Now I'm not sure it'll be worth it!
:)
Yikes, sorry Ciaran. I don't go into much detail though- there are whole avenues of fail to explore.
Actually, credit goes to Rob for spotting the ad on Friday morning- a very timely contribution.
And there was I thinking you were going to bring up the Radio 4 thing.
The TV ad now shows the URL and a call to search for "Samsung LED". Talk about cop-out...
Thoughtful post Lucy. I thought comparethemeerkat.com could be a good example here too.
comparethemeerkat is my absolute favourite marketing campaign of the decade so far.
in one word "simples"
For those that have no idea what this is referencing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0mXUC0cUPg
Have you seen the confused counter ad for that one though, "Confused about meerkats" pure genius!
I think samsung did a wonderful job in this campaign, their short url samsung.com/led will redirect you to your local country specific site, so its a truly global campaign.
as for consumers, who would actually search for LED? most people would search for LED tv, which as @nicchenet said is #1
In the Google.com.au results it shows up below 3 news articles (2 about sumsung) and then a Google News Link. So its on the first page. The campaign worked, its a successful campaign as 6 out of the first 7 results talk about the new Sumsung LED tv range.
Shouldn't the call to action have been 'search for LED TV' in that case? It's a tiny tweak that would cost nothing at the implementation stage yet it makes a big difference to those frustrated searchers...
So why does the ad specifically state 'Search for LED'? They tried to do something 'cutting edge', by substituting a call to search instead of a URL, and they fluffed it. Sorry, marks out of 10? FAIL!
I was about to say when I was halfway through the article that the "Search Google for LED" action sounds a bit cocky! If they had the position, surely that would change quite rapidly.
I also found that it is very helpful to send the user to a particular page like:
https://samsung.com/led-tv/
You could build out a page specifically tailored to the audience and at the same time, you'll see in hard numbers how your offline marketing is affecting your online marketing.
For large campaigns, you could even dynamically change the tracking tag if the user came in from that URL. This way, you'll be able to track the user's behavior and click thrus for this ad campaign.
Still think perhaps it was a typo, and the ad was MEANT to have said "Search for LED TV."
I'm lovin' the comment spam..
"Every one to take some drugs and alcohol" - I wouldn't go to a rehab clinic that advertised via comment spam :-P
Not even if they offered a free day of drinking... on them?
Great post, I like the Advert for the television. The idea of having a special offer on the website is great for getting offline traffic to the website. I will be using that in one of my campaigns.