Has Internet Marketing Killed Direct Marketing Offline?

I’ve been involved in sales and marketing online and offline for about thirteen years now. So maybe that makes me more accepting to ideas of marketing offline as well as strictly internet marketing.

I think sometimes we get very wrapped up in this idea of “internet marketing” and what it means to get high google rankings, lots of links, video marketing, and so on. There’s so many things, that we often forget that for hundreds and hundreds of years, businesses were making sales and marketing withOUT the internet.

In fact, we have offline marketing, direct mail in particular, to thank for most of the copywriting and other marketing that we do online.

And we often get on this thing about not having to pay for marketing, that video marketing, social media, articles, etc etc are free and thus are better ways to market ourselves.

But now that I’ve started making some real money online, some money that I can live on and reinvest to make even more cashflow, I’ve started to think of what I do online as a real business. I mean, a REAL business — one that could have employees, a street number, and cubicles. Okay, maybe not cubicles but you get the idea. And I therefore began to think, how would a real business market itself? This is a question that, even though we are primarily marketing online, we should ask ourselves.

I’ve always been told to treat what I do online as a real business. And I’ve always said I would. But I’m coming to realize, that I haven’t been. Until now. Now, I am open to any type of marketing that will make me more money, even if that means marketing offline.

So, let’s get creative for a moment.

You have a website. Great, that’s a good place to start. But it’s only a start. Now, we have to market that website and drive traffic to that site. Next, we’ll have to convert that traffic into leads and then into sales. Easier said than done.

The secret is targeted traffic, and finding targeted traffic that converts can be the tricky part. Finding 5,000 targeted people to come to your site in a 5 day period (that’s 1000 people per day) can be very difficult online. What if I told you, that trying to do the same thing offline might be… dare I say, easier?

Okay, so what in the crap am I talking about?

I’m doing some creative experiments, using the techniques that direct mail marketers have been doing for centuries, and are STILL doing to make loads of money, and driving that traffic to a website to generate a lead and or sale. I will be letting you know the results of this experiment in the coming month. Stay tuned.

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