Thread: Offline website promotion

I have just designed & ordered some postcards from visatprint and am going to send them out to potential customers with a discount voucher. We make acrylic cake stands for wedding cakes and jewellery display for shops. I have ordered 100 postcards to test out if this is effective and will be sending them to cake makers & wedding planners. Has anyone had any success with this method or have any other suggestions for marketing my site?

Thanks

I have always had great results when I get off my butt and hit the street marketing my hosting and design services, specially to small local businesses. I just don't get many opportunities, with my real job and all.

But YES, offline marketing can not hurt at all!!!

Hi,

Off line advertising is great. I ran a newspaper ad once. That was the best thing I did.

It taught me what bandwith was :lol: Hint: Make sure you have enough before you do any major campaign or your viewers will see a page saying bandwith exceeded

:flower:

Sami

Congratulations on your initiative. I hope it works...BUT...and unfortunately its a big but, your postcard may well be competing with 5-10 other pieces of mail, and thats just on one day...

So, the way around that is.....to follow up with a phone call....now I know that many marketers do not like doing this step, but your follow up call will in my opinion more than treble your positive responses. Its a perfectly good "excuse" to call and say something like "I sent you a postcard about our cake stands...what did you think of them? You will get to understand very quickly where you stand with that potential customer.

There are a whole range of outcomes that can come from your call so let us know what your response was like.

Or just save all that, and go knocking on doors, plain and simple!

Originally Posted by webpageguru

Congratulations on your initiative. I hope it works...BUT...and unfortunately its a big but, your postcard may well be competing with 5-10 other pieces of mail, and thats just on one day...

So, the way around that is.....to follow up with a phone call....now I know that many marketers do not like doing this step, but your follow up call will in my opinion more than treble your positive responses. Its a perfectly good "excuse" to call and say something like "I sent you a postcard about our cake stands...what did you think of them? You will get to understand very quickly where you stand with that potential customer.

There are a whole range of outcomes that can come from your call so let us know what your response was like.

This is a really great idea its like doing a survey.

Depending on one social skills and products I guess it is always something worth considering.

Let's stop exhausting our online resources and taking some offline ones.

Wow thats great... is it some thing like .. we can print our sites name on t-shirts like that.....?

For my site and business I took advice from my current host's forum's members and got pens with my URL on them.

I gave a whole bunch away outside my business and I saw maybe a 15% increase in traffic over the course of 1-2 weeks.

I prefer to use online methods to promote my website because they are much more effective in my situation than offline techniques. But rather effective is the "mouth-to-mouth" advertising - it brings me the majority of visitors and consumers.

Street marketing can be a great way to get the word out about your business. You can hire someone to canvass the wholesale districts where you live and even extend the campaign to other parts of the country using "brand ambassadors" in select cities. There are a lot of independent canvassers of this type that do nothing but represent businesses and hand out postcard and flyers. You can set a flat fee for the work and create a way to follow up to ensure the work is done. A lot of marketing companies use pictures to document this type of campaign. You can get a good street marketer for a decent price. Most do a great job because they want to be rehired. Good luck. I am sure your cards will generate business.

As people on the web world are also in the real world, it is important to do marketing on the street. But it all depends on your business.

You have to know where is your market, who are the people in needs of your product.

For some business, a website is only a marketing tool. For others, their business started with their website and without it this is no business.

Like your cake stands are made for cake makers, sending information to them is the first action to do. Next, is a phone call or personal email, and finally a visit in person if possible with a demo.

Wish you success!

I dont think offline marketing is effective, except of cases when really tons of money are paid for it

I think it is not batter to advertise a site offline.

Nice unique idea, basic salesman techniques such as this that work in the real world, should not be ignored on the web