Online and Offline Media

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there about the role of offline media in an increasingly online world. Companies are busy creating MySpace pages, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, writing blogs, running search ads, banner ads, streaming ads etc. because they know that these tools are all part of the revolution that’s going on with online marketing. And all of this is healthy. You should be building, testing, and refining these things because tools like this will become the foundation of your marketing efforts (if they aren’t already). What you want to be careful of however, is becoming so enamored with ‘New’ media that you become completely averse to more traditional forms of advertising.

Being on TV just isn’t as sexy as it used to be is it? What about radio or the newspaper? Why would you even mess with these ancient technologies when everyone knows that the web is where it’s at?

The reason traditional media still makes sense is because there are still benefits to reaching large audiences. The difference now is that instead of trying to close the deal in :30 seconds with a TV spot, you use offline media as the front-end for your online presence. Instead of expecting people to see your commercial and then call up asking to buy something, use the reach of traditional media to drive people to your web assets. You will find that people are much more willing to log on to a website after seeing your commercial than they are to call you for an appointment or walk into your showroom. The other benefit of sending people to the web is that you build a reliable tracking mechanism into your campaign. By simply monitoring the traffic to a campaign-specific landing page you can quickly see what’s working and what isn’t.

It’s critical to be online, just don’t be myopic about it. Make sure you’re making good use of all the tools available to you (new and old) and you’ll get ahead faster.