Should we still do Offline Marketing?

How many job postings of Digital Marketing Manager or Growth Hacker do you come across to everyday?

Nowadays, Google and Facebook ads are Kings of the Marketing game in the startup world.

The power of the online marketing world…

Their advantage? Total transparency and ability to monitor conversions and interest very accurately without having to have a strong technical background: Google Ads provide you with a comprehensive daily dashboard that highlighting what people coming to your website typed as keywords, on which pages they clicked, what they visited before and after, and of course ROI indicators like the click through rate and conversion rate. You’re spending a lot of money in Online Marketing but you know exactly what you’re getting out of it.

On the contrary, with Offline Marketing, tracking how well your ads performed is trickier. Take a tube ad — how do you know for sure how many people decided to buy your product directly resulting from them seeing the ad? You can of course put a voucher code in the ad that will enable you to track this. But some people might forget to use the voucher code when buying your product while the purchase results from them having seen the ad. Or the voucher code can ruin the design of the ad and make it too “salesy” and offensive for tube viewers.

As a consequence, the ROI of your tube ad or other offline marketing campaign is pretty difficult to assess accurately.

And yet, offline marketing is not dead. Look around you — how many flyers to you get in the street or in your mailbox? How many brand names do you see in your TV or in your favorite newspapers or magasines?

… doesn’t mean that offline marketing is dead: a multichannel marketing approach is key to conquer your market

I myself realised how powerful is still offline marketing when starting my first position at Rocket Internet. I was Global Expansion Manager at that time, in charge of setting up a startup called SpaceWays in new cities across the world. And when I was asked to prepare flyers campaigns for the Paris launch, I intuitively asked: “Do we still do that? Isn’t it too old school and obsolete? We will do Facebook and Google ads — do we need more than that?”.

The answer I got was that marketing is all about getting in our target audience’s mindset, and this process requires several touch points between us and them. Think about it: you are on your way to work and quickly check your Facebook newsfeed before leaving your flat, you see a SpaceWays ad in there. You then go in the tube and sit facing a SpaceWays tube ad, you open your free daily newspaper and SpaceWays has an article in there. You get out of the tube and a young student all dressed in purple (SpaceWays’s colour!) is giving you a nice SpaceWays card with a coupon you can use for your first order on the website. And you can win extra money if you refer a friend! Chance is that the day you need a storage solution (which was the core business of SpaceWays), you will think to use us. Even before — all these ads might have made you realise that you could save some space in your flat if you were storing your old stuff with SpaceWays, though you wouldn’t have had if you were not repeatedly in contact with the service.

At Rocket Internet, the saying about marketing was: you have to come across your potential customer 7 times before he or she goes for using your service in a situation they need it. Think about it yourself — how do you get a brand in your mind?

Multichannel marketing approach therefore seems to be the winning one. But you need to make sure you are doing it the right way and spending your budget wisely. As in everything, it is all about measuring and tracking: setting up a marketing dashboard that will enable you to see how much budget you’re spending per campaign and which campaigns are the most successful. It is also a lot about timing and the stage of your venture — you might be more into client acquisition than brand awareness at the early stage because you need the first clients to try out your service and give their feedback, while later on you can start investing a bit more in Offline Marketing actions.

Once again — we still can’t compare online and offline in terms of metrics. Offline might have more long-term effects of brand awareness while online is expected to have immediate conversions impact.

It’s about combining both and managing to set up some kind of tracking for all channels, same as voucher codes on mailbox cards for example (while you have to be careful this doesn’t appear too “annoying”, unaesthetic and “salesy” in customers eyes again).

My former SpaceWays Global Co-founders actually set up a new service that aims at combining offline channels like direct mail with your online campaigns to build a unified, coherent and targeted marketing strategy. It is called Optilyz, if you want to have a look at it ;)

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