Clicksharp Marketing

It is no secret that offline marketing is a major driver of online marketing. There is no clear-cut “magic number” for direct traffic (that is, the number of visitors who arrive at your website by typing your URL directly into the browser), but under most circumstances it should be at least 25%. As your traffic volumes increase, the direct share of traffic (as compared to search engine hits and referrals from other sites) will usually drop…so this is a good way to gauge the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.

But just because you’re promoting your site offline doesn’t mean your work is done. In a recent post on the SEOmoz blog, Jane Copland wrote about an ad on a Seattle bus which illustrates this very concept.

In short, the company sells real estate and advertised its product line with a little bit of humor. Jane could not remember the URL or the name of the company, and had a very difficult time getting in touch with the advertiser.

We know that marketing on the internet offers a much more level playing field than on other media. This particular anecdotes illustrates several important lessons:

1. Reserve your domain name early. Even if you won’t be launching your new company or brand tomorrow or even next month, domains are disappearing from the market at a torrid pace. Getting it now means you won’t have to compromise your image with a second-rate, off-target domain name.
2. A good name is both memorable and descriptive. Make sure your domain name contains keywords which you’d be happy to rank you in Google. This is a mainstay of smart search engine optimization, as search engines intuitively view the keywords in your URL as likely to be consistent with your business.
3. Get all your offline ad copy online! If you run a billboard placement with a really hilarious tagline, there’s always a good chance that people will remember the tagline and not your name or product. If Carbon56 in Seattle had posted their ad copy on a company blog, the odds of Jane finding the site would have improved dramatically.
4. Leverage local search media. Even if Jane gave up on trying to find the advertiser–if she was looking for an apartment in Seattle, a geotargeted search in Google might have led her to Carbon56 anyway.

Just because online marketing requires a certain kind of expertise not always congruent to traditional marketing, that doesn’t mean we should abandon the basics!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 @ 1:01 pm on the category Local search, Marketing Theory, SEM, Small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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