Using Social Media Marketing To Promote Offline Businesses Online?

If you’re promoting offline businesses online, whether your own businesses or for your clients, it is absolutely mandatory that you be using social media marketing if you expect to succeed… It really is that simple – social media marketing has become a necessary part of the marketing mix for anyone promoting offline businesses online.

Why Is Social Media So Important To Offline Businesses?

Gone are the days when people spent a lot of time sitting out on the porch and talking with neighbours and passers-by; today most prefer to interface online through the popular social media sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and the like. There are a plethora of reasons for the rise & popularity of social media sites, but as someone promoting offline businesses online all that matters is that it IS the way it is today.

It doesn’t matter WHY your target market are there – what’s important is that you realize that’s where they are so you can strategize a plan of attack to get your message out in front of them. And, if your product/service/pricing modality warrants it, get some great buzz generated by your happy customers and/or clients!

Secondly, the emergence of mobile computing on cell phones, notebooks, laptops and tablets has led to ‘local searches’ being served up by the big search engines, so to reach those within your primary census area, your local target market, you need as many ‘signposts’ as you can manage that point back to your online presence – and, where possible, signposts that include reference to your city, town or even your neighborhood.

Thirdly, people no longer grab their phone directory as their prefered way to find a local business – instead they’ll just look it up online, whether from a home computer or their mobile device. Need an emergency service like towing? Search for ‘tow trucks in Boston’… Want to pick up a pizza for dinner on your way home? Before you get into the driver’s seat, check to see which pizza company on your way home has the best specials on. Call & place your order & it’ll be waiting for you by the time you get there. New in the area and need a doctor, chiropractor, plumber or electrician? Back to your favorite search engine again…

Think for a moment – do you even know where your phone company business directory is at home right now? How long since you looked something up in it? Or do you just throw it out when the new one comes out each year, never having opened it? So if even you, yourself, is using the world wide web to find local offline businesses you can easily see why social media marketing is so important to anyone promoting offline businesses online!

Free Social Media Marketing Guide For Offline Businesses…

As a marketing mentor & speaker I talk to a lot of business people who realize they need to use social media marketing but are completely confused by the whole thing – just too many sites, too many options & too complicated! So here’s a free copy of my latest report to help you move forward with this…

Niche Social 2012 by Doug Champigny

Free Download: Niche Social guide to social media marketing for those promoting offline businesses online Niche Social 2012 is brand new, completely unique and written both to help online niche marketers and people promoting offline businesses online. Following my advice in this guide will let you zero in on the most important social media resources and set up a social media marketing mix that’s both powerful and reasonably easy to maintain yourself or outsource to a specialist.

If you’re going to be doing your own social media marketing it gives you step by step guidance to each of the ‘Big Five’ social media sites, advice on how to quafruple your online presence for free, and then how to tie those together with a few additional free resources to create a powerful social media marketing mix – all without costing you a cent!

If you’re going to be handing the task over to an outsourcer, reading this first will help you understand how it’s all done, and you can give them a printout of the report to use as their guideline while being knowledgeable about what they should do and what you should be paying them for.

Finally, I’m sure you’re asking why I would let you download Niche Social 2012 for free, right? Truth be told, my marketing mentoring is priced beyond the reach of all but the most successful individuals and many small businesses, so this is one way of helping that group become successful enough to afford me. ;-)

It’s also one of my calling cards for those with deep pockets – successful entrepreneurs, profitable small businesses and mid-to-large corporations – to show that not only do I have about 40 years of marketing experience, but that I too walk the walk each day – every social media site mentioned in the report is accompanied by screen captures of one of our properties or accounts on those very same sites.

And that’s how I know that social media marketing as laid out in the report is perfect for promoting offline businesses online – not only did I write the Niche Social 2012 e-book, it’s a copy of the exact steps we do to stay at the top of our game online too!

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Local Internet Marketing For Offline Businesses – Targeted Traffic The Right Way

Local Internet Marketing For Offline Businesses – Targeted Traffic The Right Way

Most offline businesses have jumped on the bandwagon of internet marketing as they have discovered the value of cheap, targeted advertising compared to more traditional advertising mediums. Not only that, but it offers many offline companies a much wider customer base than they could previously access offline.

Just think about it, as little as a decade ago if you wanted to sell something in another city or country you would have to open a point of sale locally, which was certainly not cheap. Most businesses couldn’t dream of expanding abroad due to costs, however the internet opened the doors to small offline businesses as well, allowing them to compete with the big fish.

Worldwide online advertising is not always suited to every type of business, especially some types of offline service providers. For example, a restaurant will never be able to service more than the local area and therefore it doesn’t make sense for its website to target the whole web. This is where local internet marketing comes in.

In this case, the SEO plan is designed to target only people interested in the local area. This can be done with the use of geographically targeted keywords, maps and many more.

The advantage of focusing on local internet marketing is that costs are usually much lower than if you were to target the general public. For example, “cosmetic dentistry in Toronto” will not cost as much per click as “cosmetic dentistry” and will only target people interested in a cosmetic dentist who is in Toronto. On the other hand, a search for “cosmetic dentistry” will bring up a very long list of cosmetic dentists all over the world.

Local internet marketing is an excellent option for offline small businesses that provide local services where their type of business does not allow them to expand globally. Plumbing, landscaping, dentistry, electrical and even cleaning services are all such businesses. On the other hand, web development companies or e-book publishers do not have the same limitations and in their case they should focus on global internet marketing.

One extremely useful way to take advantage of local internet marketing is with maps. The large search engines offer a map service where companies can register their offline address. This has multiple advantages but the main one is that it establishes credibility because people can see the physical location of your business. This also has a positive impact on the ranking of your website but, unfortunately, it is a technique that is often overlooked if an offline business owner or marketing department don’t learn from the online pros who market online daily.

Local internet marketing is an excellent way to reach extremely targeted offline customers for a much lower cost than if you were to market to the entire world wide web. However, you need to do a little more investigation regarding which keywords your PPC campaign should target and maybe even get some professional internet marketing consulting to show you how you can design and track your campaigns.

The beauty of internet marketing is that you can see virtually in real time how effective your campaigns are and tweak them accordingly. However, you do need some professional advice until you learn the ropes and can handle it yourself. The numerous free ways to drive traffic, however, are an easier task for offline businesses to master.

Search engine optimization, article marketing, podcasting, video marketing, blogging and other online marketing systems are all free, all drive targeted traffic and all can be learned in short order by offline business owners, salespeople, marketing departments, service providers, legal and medical professionals and entrepreneurs of every stripe. Don’t be stuck languishing at the bottom of the search engines or forced to shell out hundreds or thousands each month – learn how to market offline businesses online today!

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Professional online marketers use many different strategies to increase website traffic, brand their company worldwide, improve their search engine rankings and make money online. Now your offline business can use those same strategies, techniques, tips and tricks thanks to the new how-to tutorials found in Local Internet Marketing Empire – be sure to download YOUR copy today!

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Use Online Coupons For Offline Traffic In Retail Marketing

Retail marketing professionals are using the Internet more and more for business branding, to provide customer information such as store location, store hours and to show the products they retail, but in general offline retail businesses have been slow to catch on to using online coupons to build offline traffic.

There are a number of reasons why your retail marketing should already by using online coupons, such as little or no cost, added retail customer retention, increasing the lifetime value of each customer, introducing new products to your customer base, stealing traffic from local competitors and attracting new customers to your retail establishment.

One of the main fears that stop some retail stores from using online coupons is the fear of coupon fraud – that people will print numerous copies and either use them themselves or give them out to all their friends. So what? What is the purpose of using coupons, any coupons, as part of your retail marketing strategies? To get more pedestrian traffic to your retail store, right? So if online coupons bring customers back to your store more often to use the additional print-outs, haven’t your online coupons done their job? And if it brings those friends to your retail outlet, once again the coupons have fulfilled their purpose.

You do need to be careful of other types of coupon fraud with them, such as altering the coupons or trying to use numerous coupons at once. The latter is solved simply by putting the standard ‘Maximum One Coupon Per Family Per Day’ or a similar disclaimer on each coupon, while the former is avoided by making sure each cash register in your retail stores has a copy of any current online coupons displayed where the cashier can easily compare them.

Finally, as with any retail marketing initiatives designed to increase traffic, be sure to build your offers so that your profit margin, while reduced on a per-item basis, remains high on a per-sale basis. For example, limit your online coupons to offers like ’10% Off When You Buy 3′ of an item that normally sells in ones or twos, or ‘Save $25 On Orders Of $100 Or More’ so that your maximum discount is 25%, but drops as the value of the order increases.

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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Offline Businesses – Business Networking On Social Networking Sites Online

Offline Businesses – Business Networking On Social Networking Sites Online

© Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Offline businesses have always understood the value of business networking, and often offline business networking is a company’s main source of meeting new suppliers, finding new products and services to promote and getting referrals to new targeted leads. But never before has business networking been as simple or as far-reaching as it is with today’s social networking sites.

To start with, whatever niche or field your offline businesses are in probably has an association, and nowadays few industry associations don’t have websites where members can discuss issues, trade referrals and all the other areas of business networking. If your industry association was helpful to you before, think of how much more valuable they’d be to your offline businesses if they also became a source of contacts and targeted business leads?

Next, professional associations that cross the niche boundaries can be a major boost to the networking efforts of offline businesses too. For example, retail councils, manufacturing associations, wholesaler associations and even consumer advocacy groups all have websites where, with a bit of study and prudence, you can find ways to extend your business networking.

Then there are the actual social networking sites online, designed to cover all areas of business for both offline businesses and online businesses alike. LinkedIn, for example, lets each employee or owner in your company have their own resume-style page where they can list what they do and who they work for, and builds company listing pages as well showing which members of that company have pages there. A quick look at their site will show you it’s a dream come true for offline businesses looking for networking opportunities.

Social media sites like Twitter and FaceBook, and Web 2.0 properties like Google Buzz and Yahoo Buzz aren’t designed specifically for business use, but can still be extremely helpful in your business networking quest. Give your employees some guidance in how best to represent your company on these sites then allow them some time each day to network with people there in an effort to find suppliers and get referrals to targeted leads – there efforts can even help you get more traffic to your company websites and directly through the front doors of your offline businesses.

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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Offline Businesses – Train Your Corporate Marketing Department In Online Marketing

Offline Businesses – Train Your Corporate Marketing Department In Online Marketing

© Doug Champigny, http://dougchampigny.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Every year, offline businesses like insurance companies, equipment suppliers, telecommunication companies and retail chains spend a small fortune sending executives, marketing professionals and salespeople to seminars, conventions, retreats, trade shows and the like. Yet for just a small percentage of that expense they could be training their entire marketing department in the hottest emerging marketing technologies – online marketing strategies.

There still exists today a gulf between traditional corporate marketing professionals and online marketing professionals. The former are mostly old-school marketers who have come up through the ranks learning the ins and outs of traditional media and traditional strategies – skills that while vitally important, bring fewer and fewer results each year as traditional media audiences dwindle.

The latter, by comparison, would be considered ‘Rockstars’ by corporations and other offline businesses – true hotshots who get amazing results but just aren’t team players. And while everyone wants the phenomenal results corporate rockstars regularly achieve, today’s politically-correct corporations have done their best to divest themselves of them, fearing they can’t easily be controlled.

So what is the solution facing offline businesses? Most will decide to relegate any and all online marketing to outsourcing – web design firms, seo specialists, social media experts, ghostwriters and so on, at a cost of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. And even then they’ll be at the mercy of these outside companies, since no one in-house knows enough about the emerging online marketing tools and techniques to include them in the planning stages of marketing strategies development.

The smartest companies, those with the greatest foresight, will realize it’s far less expensive and far more profitable to train their existing marketing and sales departments in the online marketing ways instead. These people already fit the corporate culture of the offline businesses they work for, have the required offline savvy to make the most of traditional methods, and can now become much more valuable again by learning a whole new, though related, skillset.

Most importantly, this new professional online marketing knowledge will allow marketing plans to include the Internet right from the inception of each campaign’s planning stages and protect the company from outside suppliers pushing outdated web designs, building overly complicated web sites that don’t rank well in the search engines, holding them up for a king’s ransom to get jobs completed or taking 4 times as long as promised to deliver online properties. And if you don’t think major offline businesses fall victim to each of these scenarios every day, ask yourself when you last saw a Fortune 400 company show up on the first page of results at Google, Bing or Yahoo, or came across their presence on social media sites? Those are currently the two largest sources of online traffic, yet for all the millions they spend, the biggest corporations are shut out by small independent online marketing pros with little or no budget.

If you’re a professional offline marketer, think of how much stronger you’d be with these new technologies under your belt. If you’re an HR pro, ask yourself when an experienced professional Internet marketer last applied for ANY position within your corporation – or any other you’re familiar with. And if you’re a CEO, CFO, COO or business owner, ask yourself how long it’s going to take you to realize you should already be training your corporate marketing department in the online marketing techniques and strategies?

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor, author and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in offline and online marketing through his numerous web properties and/or through direct marketing mentoring. Give your marketing the PowerStart it needs today – Click Here for more information!

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