Thursday, October 18, 2012

Offline marketing of websites requires repetition

Lately I've been promoting social media lessons in Perth. One of the methods I've been using is to leave ads up on community noticeboards. I'm sure you've seen the kind I've been using. They're the ones with the website address and phone number hanging down vertically from the ad, so that viewers don't have to write these details down. Each ad has about 7 or 8 of these stubs.

Anyway, last night I returned to a couple of these ads that I'd left in a food court in Wembley and a nearby cafe about 3 weeks ago. I noticed that all the stubs had been removed from both of them. Now I have had a few clicks that I knew came from offline sources to the site that they were advertising. And I think I got one e-mail query as a result. But I certainly got fewer such clicks than the number of stubs that were removed.

Clearly, what was happening was that people were browsing the boards and tearing of those ads that took their fancy at the time. But most were not following up later on.

People are like that. What seems like a good idea one day just doesn't on another. A fraction of those who like your ad will actually check out the website listed. And fewer still will contact you.

Which just goes to show you have to keep at it until you find those people. It's just a long slow process of attrition.

So if you are using the noticeboard method it's a good idea to put ones up all over the city. Then go back after a few weeks and replace the ones with no stubs remaining. Out of the hundreds of stubs that people take home with them, a few are sure to convert into sales. Certainly this process takes a bit of time. But it's surely one of the cheapest methods of offline website advertising available.

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