With all of the platforms and marketing channels available to businesses today, marketing your business can feel overwhelming and even impossible with the amount of choices available. Today’s customers clearly control the conversation in terms of where they consume marketing messages and successful businesses have been quick to adapt to this new landscape and position themselves in areas that deliver the best results. It is becoming increasingly important to followup, engage, and craft relevant messages for your target audience. Fortunately there are thousands more data points for you to reach a specific demographic with virtually pinpoint accuracy, thus making your advertising much more effective. Without the proper tools and team helping you create your marketing messages and campaigns, this can seem like a daunting task for your business.

Long gone are the days of just blanketing an area or putting up a generic ad and crossing your fingers. With the right budget of course you can get a lot of exposure by just “being everywhere”, however this is costly and not an effective strategy for the long term. You can do your marketing a lot better and fortunately you are living in a time where it is even more possible and affordable with the right marketing tactics.

There is a growing trend of “old-school tactics” become much more effective in the current market place as customers are bombarded with online ads, messages, popups and newsletter subscription requests that lead to hundreds of junk mail messages.

While it is important to invest heavily in digital marketing, it is becoming equally important to maintain or initiate offline campaigns. Especially when you bridge the gap. What does this mean to bridge the gap? This is the marketing hack we are going to tell you about today and it is something we have been doing for the past few years with tremendous success in our printing business as well as with several clients.

Bridge the Gap Between Your Digital & Physical Communications with Customers

Once you perfect your online funnel for your customers, you will be collecting (or should be) data about each customer and how they interact with or purchase from your business. It is important to categorize customers and track their habits. This valuable information allows you to send them physical, printed marketing materials and packages and offers to bring them back to your online presence to complete a sale, initiate a new transaction or refer other customers.

Some great implementations of this marketing hack are:

• Send your customer a postcard with a coupon for items they inquired about but never purchased
• Send customers a flyer or brochure that includes only services or items that your customer is likely to purchase based on their past interactions, queries or purchases
• Send welcome kits to each new customer and “now offering kits” tailored to specific customers who haven’t used a service or ordered a particular product. This will help to inform them of that product or service and increase chances of them buying that service or product that they did not before.
• Another great one is to send gift cards or a special note for a customer’s birthday, anniversary, etc. Usually in these cases make it less sales-like but still focus on sales to some degree as every interaction should revolve around a call to action to make a purchase.

As you can see, there are many benefits to interacting and prospecting your clients via printed materials and print marketing. The important aspect though is to do more than just put a phone number or other contact info. The essential element to this marketing hack is to create individualized campaigns to each customer based on their profile and past interactions/purchases with your company in order to generate new sales, reorders, and build customer loyalty. Don’t just throw it together either. It is best to step back and look at your sales funnel from a birds eye view and see the flow the customers are going through for their purchases. Then inject print materials into this funnel to increase new and additional sales by bridging the gap between offline and online. Use your print materials to direct customers to some special place on your website that is part of your sales funnel. You will be able to capture your customer’s focus with the print material and encourage them to visit your online website or landing page to complete an action (usually a purchase).

If you have any questions about how this marketing hack can be applied to your business, please ask us and we’ll offer some suggestions. We are here to help you with your printing and print marketing but also your overall business success.

We have a dedicated team of marketers that we work with at the Ottawa Website Design and Marketing Agency, Creative Designs. They have helped us with our marketing by building this website, managing our SEO for our search engine ranking (which we are #1 for almost everything by the way) and also with putting together our marketing plans and campaigns to new and existing printing customers.