Online vs Offline Marketing – What Is Your Choice?

Online vs Offline Marketing, the choice is yours, but it can be pretty simple. Virtually any type of business can be promoted on the Internet and off from it. Online marketing uses the Internet to promote something. Offline marketing is done away from the World Wide Web.

As a general rule, small businesses in a local market would primarily use offline marketing. Online businesses, of course, would use mostly online marketing. Let’s compare online marketing to offline marketing and the ways to use them separately or together. Let’s just take the top 5 of each.

Offline Marketing

• – newspaper ads- direct mail
• – radio advertising
• – television
• – word of mouth

Online Marketing

• – blogging
• – pay per click
• – social media
• – video marketing
• – email marketing

My Approach To Online Marketing

Most of what I talk about on my blog are ways to make money using the Internet. People who come to my blog are not local businesses such as a plumber, or even brick-and-mortar retail stores.

Online businesses do take many shapes and forms, but chances are they’re not going to do much offline marketing. This is because they use their website to accomplish the various forms of online marketing I’ve listed above.

For example, email marketing is a very powerful form of online marketing. Local businesses should be using a website to build an email list, but an online business owner such as an affiliate marketer would generate the majority of their sales from their email list.

When I talk about blogging it is a form of online marketing. This is another thing that local businesses have begun to use in their business. A blog can be tied into a website as a way to update content for the local business.

However. for an online business, blogging has become their website. They use content marketing to drive traffic to their blog and then do various things with the visitors once they land there.

Offline Businesses

Let’s think specifically about how an offline business would primarily promote itself. Let’s use the example of a contractor that provides plumbing services.

These are local businesses and their customer base is going to be in that local market. For this reason, they can use online marketing, but only if they’re attracting customers in the marketplace that they service.

For example, if you have a plumber in Denver Colorado, website visitors from Los Angeles, California are not going to be interested in that plumber’s website. Unless they sell plumbing tips in the form of digital marketing they really are only looking at appealing to the market in Colorado where the business is at.

For a while, local business marketing was a very big market that Internet marketers got into and made a lot of money doing. They would help the local business establish an online presence by providing services that contractors or local businesses did not know how to do.

Search engine optimization was a big part of this. Optimizing a website based on keywords that somebody coming on the Internet would be typing in was very important. For example, somebody might be searching for a plumber in Denver, a Denver plumbing company, to replace my water heater in Denver, and so on.

These businesses for years survived primarily on yellow page advertising and local business marketing in newspapers or direct mail. Of course, more established businesses would rely heavily on word-of-mouth, stickers on the appliance, and so on.

Online Business

Now let’s use an example of a business that’s done primarily on the Internet. An Internet business sells products and services that often can be used by people around the world.

Digital Products are a good example of this. Digital information is a big way that online businesses make money.

Other business models such as drop shipping, buying and selling on Amazon or eBay, and so on are often done to promote physical products. There might be a specific shipping area, but that often would be done anywhere in the United States for example.

Online businesses are primarily trying to attract traffic to their website or blog. As I mentioned earlier blogging has become a primary website and therefore blogging is a traffic generation strategy that online businesses rely on.

When a visitor makes it to the website the blogger has a specific goal in mind. Building an email list is done by the most successful online businesses.

Offline businesses do this to a lesser extent, but online businesses really rely on getting repeat traffic back to their business through email marketing.

How I Do Online Marketing Blogging

Here at David Bishop Make Money Tips, I am a 100% Online business. I primarily promote a membership website that’s accessed 100% online.

This is a program called Wealthy Affiliate that teaches people how to make money in affiliate marketing. I’m not interested in any form of offline marketing so I don’t pay any attention to it.

My strategy is pretty simple. I do content marketing on my blog. On various social sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Twitter, I like to bookmark my blog posts so people can come and read them.

I am like most other online businesses in that I build an email list from my blog. This list is an excellent source of long-term income for me and online businesses would view this as an asset they are building.

I really can’t see very many examples of where an online business would be doing much offline marketing. An exception to this might be if you are promoting a business opportunity and you got some business cards to hand out as you run into people.

Even in this instance on the business card, you have a website that the person can go to and visit. They can then contact you via email for a follow-up call.

My Final Thoughts

Internet marketing has totally changed the way both online and offline businesses promote themselves today. Both types of businesses cannot rely on one specific form of marketing, but none of them can do without the Internet either.

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