Integrating Social Media with Offline Marketing
February 16, 2010 | by Erica Davidson
by Josh Peters, SMC of SLC member
In part one, integrating your social media marketing, I talked about what to do to prepare for integration and did an over view of what it takes to get it ready. Here, we’re going to go over the offline side of integration. In the next one (which will be on the Utah Pulse social media minute), we’ll look at the online side.
You don’t need to read the first one to catch what this one is all about, but it does have some good info and helps tie it all together so I’d recommend reading it.
When looking at integrating your offline and online together ask yourself this simple question. “Where can I promote my online social media presence offline?”
For starters try looking at:
Business cards
Put your Twitter, FaceBook, Blog, etc addresses on them
Loyalty cards / items
Same as with the business cards. If they have your loyalty card (or other item) then they are the type of customer you want to engage everywhere you can… they love you.
Instore placcards
Let people know where to find you
Incentivize it by letting them know they’ll get exclusive offers, info, discounts, etc
Ads (print, radio, tv, etc)
Add a couple small lines about where to find you online, also incentivize to help make people want to join.
Look at Best Buy with their TwelpForce & how they put it everywhere in their store.
Receipts
Most modern cash registers allow you to add your own custom messages. Use this space to gain awareness and incentivize them to join.
Shopping Bags
If you get custom printed ones, add your social media presences to the bag design or make an insert (preferably recyclable & from recycled material… good Karma and all that) to go in the bags.
Get creative
Look at what Trident did
Look at what else you do to market and promote your company. How can you tie them together?
How else can you possibly get your social media presence in front of them?
It also works the other way around. If you have a brick-and-mortar building,you will want to use your online activities to drive foot-traffic to your business. I’ll give you a great example from my own life.
Recently, I was tweeting about my desire to get back into a shape other than round and mentioned my interest in yoga. A local SLC company, Flow Yoga SLC, sent me a tweet and let me know that I had two free passes at the front desk waiting so I could come and try it out. I did, and immediatly I liked it. I liked it so much that I paid $60 and signed up for their Yoga 101 series that night.
If we use this as a quick case study and break it down we see how this worked and ended up in a sale for them.
1. They were obviously listening for relevenat tweets from locals so they knew their audience online.
2. They had an offer that was good enough to get me out of my house and travel the 10+ miles to take them up on it.
3. Their product was good enough to make me want more.
4. Good experience + low barrier of entry for first taste (free pass) = I bought a $60 class package
They had all the resources ready and waiting for me to make an action. I tried it, knew what it was all about, and had a killer offer (both in the free passes & the yoga 101 package) that made it hard not to buy.
All the principals and lessons learned in this can be used consistently within any other company that has an offline presence. Even if you don’t offer a product, but a service, this works. Whether it’s events, workshops, services, etc you can get the right people by following these steps and utilizing (and building upon) these ideas.
Do you have any ideas or tips for integrating the online offline and vice versa?
About Josh
Author of Twittfaced, Josh Peters is a social media consultant and trainer in Salt Lake City. He blogs at shuaism.com and helps maximize the value of social media in marketing.
5 Comments For This Post
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uberVU - social comments (February 17th, 2010 at 3:25 pm)
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by SMCSLC: Integrating Social Media with Offline Marketing http://goo.gl/fb/jU9E…
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Integrating Social Media with Online Marketing | Shuaism (February 19th, 2010 at 6:49 pm)
[...] 1. Integrating your social media marketing Part 2. Integrating Social Media with Offline Marketing Part 3. Integrating Social Media with Online [...]
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Integrating your social media marketing | Shuaism (February 19th, 2010 at 6:50 pm)
[...] 1. Integrating your social media marketing Part 2. Integrating Social Media with Offline Marketing Part 3. Integrating Social Media with [...]
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Integrating Social Media with Offline Marketing | Shuaism (February 19th, 2010 at 6:50 pm)
[...] The second part to Monday’s post Integrating your social media marketing is now up at the SMCSLC’s blog. Check it out: Integrating Social Media with Offline Marketing [...]
Great post, Josh. The principles and practices of great marketing mindset will never go away. The tools come and go. That includes social media tools in all their varied forms. Has there been a recent fundamental shift in the way we market, advertise, brand, and communicate? ABSOLUTELY! But Flow Yoga was simply using traditional marketing savvy. It just happens that they were also smart enough to use today’s tools to listen and execute. Thanks for your insights.
I agree with Jack. Basic marketing principles have not gone away. How we execute them changes and how we expect to receive information as consumers changes but it doesn’t negate the basic principles.
Another great example is that of Southwest Airlines – they have taken their brand and expanded it to social media in an engaging, informative way.
Thanks for the comments Jack and Sara, I think you’ve definitely hit the nail on the head and it’s something that people have forgotten. To me social media is not a revolution but an evolution. The same principals and ideas apply, just in new and more engaging ways.
Great post, as usual, Josh (we follow you on Twitter). We (O-CODES, local SLC company) are actually just about to launch a service similar to the Microsoft Tag example used in the Trident ad, except with simple alphanumeric tags instead of graphical codes. The aim is to enable companies to link their offline marketing with their online marketing very directly, using simple text-messageable (is that a word?) codes. We’d love to show it to you sometime to see what you think…
Yoga mats are what size?