How to Seamlessly Blend Online and Offline Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness
Marketing strategies can span across a wide range environments and can even merge across them, here is how you can seamlessly blend online and offline strategies to increase brand awareness.
Brand awareness is vital to every business as it controls the extent to which your customers understand what you offer and the quality that you represent.
In an increasingly technological world there are a wide variety of ways in which you can do this, and whilst some businesses plump for either an online or offline strategy, many are now finding that a combination of the two is the way to hit the sweet spot of brand awareness.
Signage
Signage will always be a big part of your brand awareness. It is often the introduction to your business and can say a lot about who you are and who you want to attract whilst only using very few words. Whether your business is retail based, or as a service provider, you will want to let people know what you represent as quickly as possible, and getting the right signage is the perfect way to do this.
There are a range of styles of signage that can give an instant impression to customers. For example, a neon style sign gives huge impact and can incorporate complex shapes. With the ability to change colour, flash or even strobe, it is the perfect way to grab attention.
Metal signs offer sophistication and style, using materials such as stainless steel or brushed aluminium. They can also be sprayed or powder coated to match any branding colours, and lighting can also be added to really make them stand out.
Wooden signs ooze traditionalism and can have a more subtle and natural effect. Wording can be carved or etched to create the effect that you are looking for.
Your signage can involve a huge range of factors, and you are only limited by your imagination. It is a way to call out to your customers and invite them across the threshold, so it is important to think about how it ties in with the rest of your branding, and what it tells the public about what they can expect from you.
Online Marketing
Online marketing can take a number of different forms, including your website, social media and direct emails. Whichever methods you choose, it is important that they all link together to make your brand recognisable and memorable.
Online marketing is a popular choice because of the massive audience that it is capable of reaching. With virtually everyone online in some way these days, there are some terrific possibilities when it comes to the size of your audience.
The type of marketing available online means that you can be very targeted in your approach. The right combination of Google ads, hashtags and email addresses mean that you can define your target market and chase them very specifically. This can make your brand awareness much more focused as you know exactly who is going to be seeing it.
It is also something that can be changed at a moments notice, as you are only an upload away from completely changing what you have done before, something which is much harder to do with more tangible offline strategies.
It also much easier to measure the impact of an online marketing campaign. There are many analytical tools to tell you how many people you have reached and how they responded, making it much more straightforward to work out whether you have got your branding right or whether it still needs some work.
One of the huge reasons more people are turning to the internet as a way to promote their business is because it is affordable. Even the smallest brands are able to set up an online presence and begin targeting customers in an effective way.
Direct mail
Direct mail has long been used as a strategy to get attention. Putting something through a letterbox means the owner of the property is forced to hold it in their hands and look at it.
To make this successful, your leaflet or brochure needs to be eye-catching and intriguing, making people want to look at it more closely instead of putting it straight into the recycling. It also allows you to target a niche audience and you have very few limits to the amount of information that your mail can contain.
Billboards
A billboard advertisement is always eye-catching, particularly if it uses beautiful artwork or clever wit. It is something which people are likely to see day after day if they take the same route to work or the shops and so it can very quickly become ingrained in their brains. These types of adverts can expensive, but they have massive impact to a potentially huge and wide-ranging audience.
15 Minutes of Fame
We are all due our 15 minutes of fame, so it is also worth considering television or radio advertising. This opens your brand up to thousands, if not millions of people who are a captive audience in that moment. It is a very expensive option, but when it is done in the right way, it can arrest people’s attention, and even become something of a talking point.
Merging your strategies needs a careful eye on consistency. You need to make sure that the things that make your brand what it is are maintained in every format and that you always keep the aims of the business and your potential customer in mind.
If all of your options are used cohesively, it can create an effective brand presence that will stick in the mind and make your business the one people think about when choosing where to spend their hard earned money.
Some businesses are quick to write off offline strategies as being to traditional or expensive, but when combined with an online campaign, they can help to cement your brand and make it something that people remember. The two should not be mutually exclusive, instead they should work side by side to catch all aspects of your potential market and maximise what your brand is capable of.