Article

Adele Thomas
Adele Thomas 1 June 2020

Why Offline Marketing isn’t Dead

With the world currently in a spin, you might be tempted to ditch your offline marketing and stick purely to online marketing but what if your business would actually benefit from a push in offline marketing?

With the world currently in a spin, you might be tempted to ditch your offline marketing and stick purely to online marketing and if your brand demographics can clearly support this, then there’s nothing wrong in doing so.

However, what if your business would actually benefit from a push in offline marketing? Naturally, if you sell clothes, beauty products or even household products you might think that offline marketing is currently a waste of time, but what if your business is in construction, or plumbing or even in the legal sector?

If your business falls into a category where it’s much difficult to target the right message or people online, then offline marketing should help to resurrect your brand, even during a lockdown.

People still need local advertising

If your business consists of one or many commercial premises that are located roughly 10 miles apart, you might naturally target the local communities that your business is close by too. Even with the country in lockdown, you should still keep your offline marketing efforts locally.

Should someone require your services urgently or wish to keep things local to prevent unnecessary travel, your business should be front and center.

You can keep offline marketing local in several ways:

  • Leaflets
  • Flyers
  • Personalised chocolates and gifts
  • Local radio advertising
  • Local print advertising

Leaflets and flyers can be very effectively if done properly, with the right amount of information that goes straight to the benefits of your service or product, without waffling too much that could lose the interest of a potential customer.

Flyers and paper advertising may also prove more effective now people are spending more time at home, they may even enjoy receiving something through the post, which they have more time to spend reading and engaging with the information you’ve provided.

The current lockdown situation as increased the number of people listening to radio, Capital FM and even BBC radio stations have seen a considerable increase, in some cases over 15-18%.

Understanding who listens to the radio, is a great step into knowing exactly what time you should advertise and which of your local channels will be most beneficial.

People have more time to engage with offline marketing

As mentioned briefly above, imagine before, where a majority of people would come home from work, pick up their post and place it on a counter where it would be quickly sieved through and potentially chucked away unless of course it was deemed interesting and eye catching enough to keep you reading.

Now, with more people working and staying at home their time is much more flexible, in fact, aside from the usual snail mail, people have used quarantine as an opportunity to send bespoke letters and cards to loved ones, in which they wouldn’t have done so before.

Need more convincing? Neil Patel has a very useful blog on Direct Mail Effectiveness.

Even some stationery businesses have experienced incredible increases in sales as people take a more traditional approach to sending messages.

So if there was a time to send them a personalised branded gift or even customise your leaflet or flyer to look like a hand-written letter, that includes a personal touch, you can bet that it will be received with a higher rate of interaction than your usual leaflet.

Lockdown has changed the way we think about the offline world

Obviously Covid-19 has devastated businesses and families but it has opened our eyes and hearts to see that there is so much more to life than what’s online and when the people and things we hold dearest to us are taken away, we have began to see life differently.

Physical activities such as arts and crafts have taken a sharp upwards turn, especially as many families want to keep their kids entertained, but adults have also taken to do more physical activities that don’t require a phone or an internet connection.

How could you utilise your marketing efforts to create something unique and trending?

  • Create a branded puzzle
  • Send a hand-written letter that’s personalised to your customer
  • Attached additional gifts with your offline marketing such as notebooks or colouring books.

Offline marketing is far from over, in fact I would say it’s only just started and with the world changing their habits, interests and how they spend their time, I would suggest businesses take the time to consider new trends to find opportunities on how they can still market their business offline.

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