How to Use Offline Media to Drive Social Media Engagement
By Cate Palmer
Offline and online presences are like two siblings who developed completely different features. When placed together in one room, they may disagree, but will always stick together. The sibling metaphor was purposeful and intended to closely help you relate to today’s problems in understanding that offline and online media are not that different in respect to content, but in the way they are perceived and used. Marketing switched from old-fashioned media to the digital world a few decades ago and that changed the ways strategies and campaigns are led.
But offline marketing is still not obsolete. If anything, it can be used to boost social media engagement and help reach the target audience.
Promote Social Media Profiles in Your Offline Media
The most common mistake is to forget to use your brand name. This is often not intentional, but rather an oversight. A study by Pardot showed that 80 percent of consumers will probably choose the brands they follow on social media channels. That’s why you should always incorporate your brand’s name over all social media you use in the campaign and make it stand out, because pictures and videos will be remembered for their stories, but you people to associate them with your company and products.
When you prepare the offline campaign, make sure that you clearly accentuate the brand’s name as the core of your advertisement. In this way, potential customers will find you easily on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all other channels.
Advertise Online Engagement With Your Brand
Results from the study done by Nottingham Trent University showed that an average individual uses their smart phone 85 times a day, amounting to almost five hours on it. And they use it while doing something else at the same time, like talking to friends, watching TV or commuting, which means it’s with them almost all the time. This is an important fact because it means you can use it to engage them with your brand on social media by asking them to become participants in promoting your message about your brand by retweeting or sharing Facebook posts about your brand, and not merely be the receivers of the message.
Give Incentive to Offline Users
As mentioned above, by clearly promoting your brand’s name in offline media, the users will be most likely track you online. But, still, this is not perfect since offline marketing is also densely occupied with brands and messages. In order to motivate the transfer of users from offline media to online ones, try utilising the reward system such as giveaways for those who interact with you online, offer discounts, coupons and promo codes, create campaigns that request of users and influencers to take pictures with your brand or ones depicting it and posting them online on your account.
These are all legitimate and effective ways to create a habit with your customers to regularly check your online profile.
Use Offline Media Inventively
Billboards and neon lights used to be everywhere and still they are, but because their number has grown and the customers have gotten used to their presence it is time to use some other offline marketing resources to promote your brand and direct attention to your social media profiles. Display ME real estate displays provide an interesting solution for how to be visible and noticed, and more importantly remembered through window and wall hanging signs, which placed in the line of vision are sure to get the attention of passers-by. When it comes to this type of advertisement, it’s better to keep them simple and to the point, with emphases on the brand name and an invitation to find out more online.
Involve Your Brand in Everyday Life
If you want to draw attention to yourself, you must become part of everyday stories and events. This includes communicating with your customers and in that way expecting to achieve participation in their conversation. Instead of asking them to visit your online profile, give them something to talk about on your social media pages and thus become actively involved in their discussion. For example, you can ask them a question, a simple one like: “Is this lipstick color a daily option or more appropriate for a night on the town? Tell us what you think on our Facebook page”.
This will increase the traffic on your profile, website and start a discussion about your brand among the visitors.
Finally
Always treat your potential customers as people, not only consumers and a means to increase your profit. Using the human approach in marketing is nothing new, but with the online space crowded and overwhelmed with information and data, it’s easy to forget that you are talking to emotional and sentient beings. For decades humans have been introduced to new products through offline marketing resources, so it’s something they got used to and are familiar with. If carefully designed, an offline campaign can help the social media engagement and even create new and mixed marketing strategies based on combining these two approaches.
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