Off-line or On-line Advertising for Businesses

I beg to differ, Jamie. The fact the people's physical mail boxes are less full these days makes good quality direct mail noticed more now than ever.

It's our online mail boxes that are too cluttered, often causing us to delete many emails without taking any notice of them.

Interesting response Linda.

My wife heads up the offline marketing team for OCR, who handles curriculum, exams and stuff, which is surprisingly very traditional in its approach with offline marketing, mailshots for teachers, heads etc, but it kind of echoes your sentiment about using govt backed organisations.


I think you can breakdown small businesses into categories, and I'd agree with you have those who are commercial and aiming for growth, but then you have tradesmen (is that person??) and professionals who may be a 1 or 2 man band, but will remain at a certain size, who can or only choose to service a set number of clients. You could include IT consultants and web freelancers.

But then I think there is another category, which is then the hobby business or lifestyle business as it's often referred to. This can be anything from someone making greeting cards for craft fairs, to a husband and wife team running a B&B which gives them an income, but isn't the primary motivation.

Just my few shillings worth!

That's a fair point you make hdm. I think that good quality direct mail has always been noticed amongst the rubbish that people send out though.

I have only ever tried direct one direct mail campaign before and it didn't convert well at all. This more than likely was down to me not optimising it well enough though (although I did follow the advice of Dan Kennedy who reportedly had a lot of success with direct mail).

I personally have had far more success with online marketing but I'm sure both will have their place in future.

I also meant to add, he exact same can be said for email marketing quality as direct mail quality. If you are delivering emails with compelling subject lines to a double opt in list using a firm like Aweber, the open rates and conversions can be amazing.

I still believe that both methods should exist and grow together as every channel for communication is important!

Lol, I always get very excited when I see there is a reply in some of my threads SESA (sorry for the abbreviation), you can use banners if you are online based business. Simply put them on strategic places.

Completely agree with Steve. Spot on. I think for most small businesses that online advertising is better for the lower budgets. It can be much more targeted and it is very measurable......

Is there anyone willing to share their experience with online and off line marketing, as it seems we are all speaking generally

I think it depends on:

1) What industry you are in
2) Who your target market is

I think it is important for any business however, to have a website at the very least

In a way it does. but at the same time, there are a lot of things you can do for just about every company that wants to promote online, its just the way you do it that differs slightly, and is service or product specific. I think it works in the same way for offline marketing.

You can advertise on billboards, newspapers, magazines, posters, the works, and by giving out promotional products, or even resort to Guerrilla Marketing offline, and then work on forums, other social networks, videos, podcasts, blogs and websites online.

Even if you're business is online, providing an online service or software, you could still use offline marketing as a means to get more clients. Its just that for every niche, and just about every marketer out there, its how they do it that makes the difference.

For me, both are good, and its sometimes even better if you do both. However if your budget is a little low, go for online advertising. In this way, you can experiment on the ads you put out, you can change them anytime at any point! But if you are confident with your business and you think that you only need to get people to see your business, go for offline because its easier to identify which places your target market can be found!