A lot of businesses, including some really big ones, consider SEO, Social media and content marketing to be different from their regular marketing campaigns. Shockingly, a lot of these businesses do not have even any sort of interaction between their SEO and marketing teams. Sometimes the internet visibility part is outsourced and there is little to no interaction between the two. I may not be wrong in estimating that at least 50% of the marketing teams are not even aware of their business also having an Internet strategy.
The reason is simple - these marketing teams in traditionally offline businesses do not consider internet a big part of their overall strategy. They continue to work on medium such as television campaigns, print media, trade shows, etc. Consequently, these businesses miss out on a crucial aspect that could help increase online visibility. As anyone who has ever been on the internet could tell, businesses that rank on the first page of Google for related keywords often have a greater chance of landing inbound leads. Unless marketers start seeing the benefits out of such inbound marketing campaigns, they do not seem to invest in them.
This is a critical catch-22 problem. That’s because without a strong offline engagement strategy, the online visibility may not reach the true potential. There is a strong correlation between strong engagement offline and the corresponding growth in visibility online. Here are some ways businesses increase their online visibility by engaging offline.
Use Company Assets For Promotion:
This is a vital element of offline marketing to promote online visibility. Let us take the example of a chauffeur service that offers airport pick ups and drops. Such services routinely have their Facebook profiles or the website URL painted over. This gives a quick reference to any potential customer who is looking for a car hire. However, the most important aspect to such use of company assets is on user generated websites. It has been observed that companies that aggressively promote their social profiles offline are more likely to be tagged from social media websites. Since social media engagement is now an important part of search engine algorithms, such promotional techniques help in improving the online visibility of the business.
Business Cards For Review
The sales team at any business routintely meets prospects with whom they share their business cards. It has been observed that promoting your business review page on the business cards improves conversion rate. That’s because companies that share their customer reviews from services like Yelp instigate the prospects to visit the site to explore more about the business. It is a given that for most businesses reviews on sites like Yelp are likely to be more negative than positive. However, businesses that offer great responses and helpful feedback back to the reviewers who have rated negatively are known to enhance their credibility. This helps in improving the conversion of new leads. This has a cyclic effect as more customer signing up after reading reviews on Yelp lead to further reviews on these online services that build further authority to your business online.
Giveaways Through Social Profile
This is one of the tried and tested ways to improve online visibility via offline promotions. Companies regularly conduct contests and giveaways to increase word of mouth promotion and engage customers. However, a lot of such giveaways are conducted through third party couponing sites or on newspapers. If your business has a Facebook page, it is a good idea to conduct all such giveaways over here. The like button on Facebook is an inherent viral element that can instantly cause word-of-mouth reference to your giveaways. By organizing your giveaways here, not only do you ensure your online visibility is enhanced via offline promotions, but it also becomes easy to measure the success of a campaign through the analytic tools that this social network provides to its partner businesses.
What are the other techniques you know that can improve online visibility via offline strategies? Please tell us in the comments.