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 most of their efforts online. Unfortunately this is a BIG mistake on their 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 idea of going on 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 required to see that both Internet marketing and traditional marketing strategy need to complement each other and support each other from their various strengths. I like to refer to this more complete picture of a marketing strategy as “blended 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 case before you can correctly 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 pick up steam. 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 blend 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 mix marketing strategy can benefit you and give you some techniques I use when building your mix marketing plan.
To help you gain a better perspective on the concept of blended marketing, I suggest you give a quick read of Rena Bernstein’s Social Media Today post titled “Integrating Social Media with Traditional Advertising to Gain Higher Returns.” It’s a great read and provides some valuable insight into the benefits as well as examples of how effective it can be if done correctly.
What is marketing mix?
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 companies fail to integrate both Internet marketing and traditional marketing strategies. By leveraging the strengths of both 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 takes advantage of the various strengths of both an internet marketing strategy and a traditional marketing strategy where you work to increase your search engine rankings and your exposure on the internet, while at the same time also increasing your reach and exposure offline.
Different aspects of a combined marketing strategy might 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 on multiple fronts.
Benefits of a Combined Marketing
The benefits of a combined marketing strategy are enormous and allow you to really 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 combined marketing strategy can provide.
Creating a Combined Marketing Strategy
Creating a marketing mix 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 need to identify:
- Who is your target audience
- where do they hang out
- How to reach them
- What are your needs?
- How can you satisfy 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 marketing mix strategy to incorporate the various resources available to reach your market. This is where the fun begins! Be creative with this, and be sure to explore all possible options for getting 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 reflect this effort offline through direct mail pieces? If you are going to use the Third Tribe concept for your online marketing, what real-world business networking and industry convention events will you attend to build brand awareness? Consider how you are going to integrate social media into your marketing mix 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, “Yo, 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 overall marketing mix. Spend a lot of quality time on this process, because the more time you spend on market research and development to create your marketing mix strategy, the more effective your marketing mix strategy will be.
I hope you found this information helpful and apply what you’ve learned to create your own combined marketing strategy for whatever your business is.
To your success!
