Off-line or On-line Advertising for Businesses

Definitely, thats what I mean by a blended approach, mix on and offline.

Offline wise, by giving someone a biz card or flyer is going to potentially drive traffic to your site, which is going to be highly targeted traffic, as they are obviously already interested in your products/services.

There is also some great tricks to bring offline marketing alive and direct it to your site. Things like QR codes, Aurasma and Touchcode:

Heres a few good threads:

QR Codes & QR Code Marketing

Aurasmsa! (augmented reality)

Touchcode

Absolutely. The fact that the majority of online charity donations are triggered by direct mail gives you a good idea of how powerful it is.

Well in my opinion both are important. But if you don't want to spend more on online marketing. Just do business listing in business directories. It will give you good result. These days people look for digital directories to search for appropriate service provider.

I like both. I have had leads from online adverts I have also had leads from Business Card drops and then word of mouth. I even had someone come upto me in the Doctors Surgery and ask if I could do some work for the (they noticed my work uniform stating my services)

I think a mix of both is a good idea.

Is your business online or offline. Anyways I believe that business needs to be promoted more online and offline. The weight-age given to each could be different depending on which audience you want to target.

Off line marketing is good but it is expensive than than the online marketing.
off line marketing may have limits for the geographical area time limits for the advertisements but for online advertisement there is not much bindings to reach peoples and also about time limit .
Online marketing covers larger area for the advertisement.

Surely matters such as the type of product you sell, the type of customers who buy and affordability all affect what decisions you reach re off-line or on-line advertising? Also whether you go for straightforward advertising or rely on simply making potential customers aware of you and what you do.

Our customers are very thinly spread throughout England (anywhere from Yorkshire to Bristol) with many of them being from the South-East. They're a very small minority of the total population and want lots of information before they're prepared to make their decisions about suppliers. They'll only need information from these suppliers once or twice in their lifetimes. It would cost a bomb to reach them by off-line advertisements.

Is there a time when these potential customers all come together, such as an annual expo or trade fair? In which case off line could be a winner, from literature, flyers etc. But agree product/service type can also be decisive in marketing decisions.

Not as regards the careers counselling and education / careers guidance services which are a very important part of my business. People only start looking for this kind of support when they hit a problem and need an (instant) solution.

There's also only a small amount of benefit to be had from targeting and approaching the decision-influencers at their conferences.

Teachers and university lecturers naturally feel that all education / careers guidance problems should be sorted out by internal or state-funded resources (though state provided careers guidance is now largely limited to an under-advertised national telephone / web service). Also, they will only "sell" services that are available to all their students, regardless of the income of their parents. Fee-funded services like mine aren't affordable to most low income families.

Perhaps even more importantly, I'd be appalled if I generated too much business at any one time because I couldn't handle it. I'm probably in a similar situation to ithastobedone and any other craft-based worker.

I sell quality of work and individualised career guidance reports; you can't provide that unless you do a lot of hard thinking and research for each client. I never want to repeat the experience I had once of working from 6.00am to 12.00 midnight every day for 15 days because my most important corporate client had given me large recruitment and management development projects to do simultaneously.

The obvious answer - recruiting short-term help - would be more hassle than I'm prepared to volunteer for because there's so much variation in the standard of assessment and reports that individual career consultants write.

The small business world probably divides into those who are properly entrepreneurial and commercial (whose businesses may become large ones) and those who are simply self-employed professionals (for whom their businesses are mainly a paying hobby). I'm in the second category of business owners - it often surprises me how much that basic difference in motivation affects so many individual marketing and business decisions.

Both are important but what you must remember is that as time goes by, online advertising is going to become the more dominant medium. We are already seeing the traditional advertising methods dying out and losing their effectiveness.