Marketing in general is a vast and complex beast that requires knowledge and effort to truly master it and harness its full potential to grow your brand, let alone your business. Any good internet marketing strategy can effectively help you build your business online. However, as many Internet entrepreneurs seek to expand their online presence and further grow their businesses, I find that many of them fail to create a complete marketing and business development strategy, focusing the majority of their efforts online. Unfortunately, this is a BIG mistake on your part.
Throughout my career as an entrepreneur, business owner, and web designer, I have done business with many individuals and companies who want to increase their reach, develop stronger brand awareness, and build a strong internet presence. Yet through all of their questions, two common fears continually surface during my conversations with many of them. Either they dreaded the thought of undertaking a huge internet campaign or they felt that internet marketing would replace their tried and true traditional marketing methods. Both of these fears are rooted in the fact that the vast majority of them simply lacked the proper knowledge necessary to see that both Internet marketing and traditional marketing strategy must complement each other and support each other’s various strengths. I like to refer to this more complete picture of a marketing strategy as “mixed marketing.”
Why do I need to do marketing?
If you plan to generate any kind of income online, you need to understand that your blog or website is simply an extension of your real business. You must first develop your business model before you can properly identify how to apply your blog/website as a useful tool in your overall marketing and business development strategy. Any successful business has a marketing strategy to grow their business. You can’t just set up a blog or website and expect business to rush in. You need to have a strategy to help attract the interested buyers you want.
gain some perspective
As a successful internet entrepreneur and internet marketing expert, I have been using a blended marketing strategy for over a decade to maximize my reach, increase my exposure, and better market to my target audience to grow my business online. I’d like to share with you how a blended marketing strategy can benefit you and provide you with some techniques I use when building your blended marketing plan.
To help you get a better perspective on the concept of blended marketing, I suggest you take a quick read of Rena Bernstein’s post on Social Media Today titled “Integrating Social Media with Traditional Advertising to Gain Higher Returns.” It’s a great read and provides valuable information on the benefits as well as examples of how effective it can be if done correctly.
What is blended marketing?
Blended marketing is essentially a combination of Internet marketing and traditional offline marketing methods to create a more comprehensive overall marketing and business development strategy. Many businesses fail to integrate both Internet marketing and traditional marketing strategies. By leveraging the strengths of an Internet marketing strategy and traditional marketing, you will better position yourself and/or your business for greater success.
The idea of a blended marketing strategy is to create a complete marketing strategy that leverages the various strengths of both an internet marketing strategy and a traditional marketing strategy where you work to increase your search engine ranking and your Internet exposure, while at the same time At the same time, it also increases your offline reach and exposure.
Different aspects of a blended marketing strategy can be, for example, using an email marketing campaign in conjunction with a direct mail campaign to deliver a targeted promotion to a select group of recipients. Some email marketing systems provide a service where they will also send a direct mail piece to your email list, as long as you have addresses for each recipient on your list. This is just one high-level example of how a blended marketing strategy can work to ensure a broader reach from multiple fronts.
Benefits of a Combined Marketing
The benefits of a blended marketing strategy are huge and allow you to actually grow your business at a much faster rate than if you didn’t have one. A combined marketing strategy allows you to:
- Get more exposure
- Market to the same audience through multiple online and offline marketing efforts
- Track the effectiveness of various campaign efforts
- Identify the strengths of online and offline marketing strategies
- Create multiple promotions for various marketing strategies
- Generate multiple sources to feed your sales funnel
- Create brand awareness online and offline
- Market products/services both online and offline
- Present yourself as a strong and stable business
- Sales increase
These are just a few of the many benefits that a blended marketing strategy can provide.
Creating a blended marketing strategy
Creating a blended marketing strategy isn’t that difficult if you know your target audience and have identified how to reach them. From there, you can design a marketing strategy that allows you to reach your target audience on multiple fronts to ensure your message is heard.
The first step is to conduct market research (yes, you have to and you can’t skip this step). When conducting market research, you should identify:
- Who is your target audience
- where they hang out
- how to reach them
- What are your needs?
- How can you meet your need?
- will they buy
Identifying a market for whatever you are offering is essential to the success of any business, whether online or offline.
The second step is to start building your blended marketing strategy to incorporate the various resources available to reach your market. This is where the fun begins! Get creative with this and be sure to explore all possible options to get your message to market. For example, you may want to include the various resources to syndicate your content not only for online purposes but also for offline purposes such as industry magazines and journals. If you’re creating an email marketing campaign, how will you mirror this effort offline through direct mail pieces? If you are going to use the Third Tribe concept for your online marketing, what industry convention events and real-world business networking will you attend to build brand awareness? Consider how you’re going to integrate social media into your blended marketing and how you can get people to follow you from your offline efforts.
The best way to create a blended marketing strategy is to mirror your online marketing efforts with potential real-world offline efforts that can accomplish the same, if not similar, task as your online efforts. Just ask yourself, “Me, what offline marketing effort would be similar to this online marketing effort”? Then make a list of all the related marketing strategies and decide which one to integrate into your full blended marketing strategy. Spend plenty of quality time on this process, because the more time you spend on market research and development to create your blended marketing strategy, the more effective your blended marketing strategy will be.
I hope you have found this information useful and apply what you have learned to create your own blended marketing strategy for whatever your business is.
To your success!
