Hi Suhyb,
You pose an interesting question: develop an online marketing plan and is there any difference offline marketing plan. Whilst offline plans target a specific audience in press, mail and tv, an online marketing plan (using internet) can result in your business being targeted by unknown audiences. If you think about it, with the digital age forging ahead at great speed, audiences that used to buy newspapers are now reading these online on PCs, tablet devices and even their phones – would you continue to target these people via offline methods?
However, to have a successful campaign, what is now more important is how to integrate both offline and online marketing plans – create a positive synergy that allows you to develop and seemless transition in the audience’s mind…..just look at this scenario, consumer receives a mailing from you, they also then see this offer advertised in the newspaper. Because the creative looks similar, the consumers remembers this from the mailing. He/she then either searches for the campaign using SEO are inputs the URL from the mailing. Again, the creative look of the website is similar…a total integrated approach that utilises both offline and online.
You may have already considered the main components of an offline marketing plan, but in my professional experience, a successful online marketing plan needs to have the following:
- A perfect landing page or website. Most times, you’ll already have a website, but a question to ask yourself: do you wish to send your target audience to the main website or just to one section of this that holds the offer. I would think, you’ll state the latter part – if so, then consider building a land page(s) that only hold specific information related to the offer. This means that your target audience are not bombarded with other information
- Consider your email strategy. Do you want to be specific in what you are offer or do you want to tease the audience into clicking the appropriate ‘call to action’. By teasing them, once they have clicked on the next step (where you want them to go), you’re half way there! If you try and tell the whole story about the offer in the email, you may reduce the clickthrough – best way is to think what would you do in the same scenario?
- If not email, how else are you going to get your audience to your landing page? This is where you can look at your offline plans and see how to get combine both elements. In addition to this, think about your online advertising? I mentioned above, that consumer who previously read newspapers offline are now moving to online versions – this is where you have a good opportunity to target specific audience by means on online banner advertising and compliment this by offline advertisements in the same publication.
I recently completed an integrated marketing campaign and although the offline strategy produced low results, the online strategy worked really well (but this was also due to synergy between offline/online) and the target email strategy brought in a 9% clickthrough rate, which is excellent for financial products.
So to end this, I would say, concentrate more on online and consider the opportunities available but don’t forget offline – use this as a companion to your digital work and you could end up with better results than anticipated.
Hope this helps
Razwan Sharif
