Online versus offline marketing

I’m going to try to explain a little bit about the differences between online marketing and offline marketing based on my experience. It’s a good exercise to do, especially when you have to pitch to a potential client or when you’re trying to convert a new supplier to online retailing. For me, the first step is to understand the differences between online and offline shopping behaviour.

Offline shopping

For those who are “nonline”, shopping is all about the experience – wandering around, browsing, chatting to those who you’re with and enjoying a bit of spending therapy. As a result, all the marketing campaigns that surround you have got a tough job in catching your attention. Advertisers have their work cut out to produce the most outrageous bill boards or point of sale posters, whist marketers will be trying to catch you when you’re actively looking for something to buy. It’s extremely likely that you will miss a lot of the activity around you. Marketers will be looking to drive footfall with their work, though they will not really be able to track how successful they will be. Adverts, posters, gimmicks, short skirts… they’re all out there and they’re all trying to generate leads.

Online shopping

Online shoppers know what they’re looking for and are not prepared to be interrupted when looking for it. Advertisers must understand that their messages have to be targeted. Banner blindness exists mainly in mature online shopping communities such as that in the UK, but not so much in countries such as Hong Kong, where online shopping has not taken off. Trigger happy surfers will be the advertisers’ best friends. Marketing activity online will then be focussed around converting the long tail searchers, people who are ready to buy and looking for the best deal. PPC, affiliates and shopping comparison sites will be the core of your marketing activity and you’ll be able to distinguish between which ones are your best performers.

Integrated campaigns

If you are able to do both online and offline marketing, don’t treat them in isolation. From my time at Comet, I knew of an online marketing manager who was prepared to remove his best selling “TVs” PPC campaign on Boxing Day, the busiest trading day of the entire year, because he was afraid that he’d only end up driving footfall instead of increasing ROI on paid search. It made no sense, TVs are the bread and butter of Comet, easily the largest product in the sales mix, but this marketing manager didn’t care, and it seemed that he just wanted to protect his reputation. Flip this example on its head and you could imagine TV adverts that didn’t have website addresses written in at the very end. Would this be marketing suicide?

The most fundamental thing to remember is that more and more people are using both online and offline to shop. People are quite happy to put physical effort into going to see a product before looking for a bargain online. It’s perfectly normal to do so. If you want the product today, then you might even look online to see if your local store has it in stock or at least sells the item you’re looking for.

Conclusions

So, there you go, a very brief explanation on what the differences between online and offline marketing are. There is so much more detail to get into, and it would be impossible for me to put it into a blog post, it would turn into something more like a white paper. If you’re going to take anything away from reading this, remember that you need to remind yourself of the modern day shopper that will use as many forms of research as possible. This population of shoppers is growing all the time, so if you think the Internet is still a fad then you’re going to be in for a bit of a surprise. Define the boundaries and objectives of online and offline marketing and make sure you mesh them together.

SEO, online marketing and what else?

So, now that I've decided that I'm going to be a writer of sorts, I figured that I ought to be writing. But what should I write about? A pretty obvious question with a fairly straightforward answer; I should begin with something that I know a lot about. With this in mind, I've decided that I'll start with my job - online marketing.

I've been involved with online marketing for just over 3 years and over the course of these 3 years, I've ended up specialising in SEO, or search engine optimisation for those who aren't familiar with the acronym. However, my exposure in the general online marketing field has been very broad and as a result, I also have a great deal of experience in affiliate, email, PPC, price comparison and Web 2.0 marketing too. But I'll begin with a bit about SEO.

What is SEO?

It's a fair question. Pre search engine optimisation experience, I was none the wiser about how websites were ranked by Google. Who'd bother thinking about that anyway? Well, I'm assuming that most people wouldn't really dwell too much on the topic, but as soon as I found out about SEO, I was totally blown away. People actually tweak websites to make them more attractive to the search engines and some even try to fool them. It's crazy, but it's true. There are a number of ways of optimising a website for certain search terms. The main bits that you'd want to look at would be the page title tags, the linking structure, the quality of the HTML code and more importantly, the website content or copy. There's a saying in the SEO industry that sums this last point up perfectly: Content is King. It's obvious, a search engine returns results based on something that someone's looking for, so a website that talks about that certain something must be best. That used to be the case and some devious people knew it and took advantage of it, but there are external factors too that affect a website's overall performance.

Inbound linking from external websites is essentially the crux of SEO. In its crudest form, search engine optimisation is a popularity contest. If you're out with your mates and a really attractive member of the opposite sex were to approach you and say, "I think your friend over there is really good looking", you might laugh. But at some point, you might even think to yourself that if this attractive person really rates your friend, then that must make your friend attractive too. Google will look at the sites linking into a website and then determine how good those links actually are and this forms part of the big algorithm that orders websites in the results pages. If an authoratative site, such as the BBC, were to link to yours, you can expect your website to perform quite well.

I've tried to avoid going into too much detail on this subject, as there's a lot of literature about SEO out there already. I don't want to go into the specifics about how you'd go about executing your SEO strategy, just wanted to share an insight into the subject. If you want to know more, don't hesitate to get in touch. Next time, I'll write about a different online marketing discipline. Bye for now.