For most marketing professionals, identifying and then nurturing potential customers, also known as lead generation, is deemed the most important goal. Although many of them are now focusing on generating leads from digital channels only, there are vast opportunities lying in offline marketing channels as well. Unfortunately, these are mostly untapped by B2B marketers. However, you can reach a wider audience, capture more diverse customer segments, and moreover increase the chances of lead conversion by using both offline and online marketing strategies for your lead generation efforts.
Although marketers are more aware of online marketing trends such as creating landing pages, optimizing website content, implementing forms for lead capturing, or leveraging paid advertising techniques, there are a lot of offline marketing strategies that may help you boost your business. The offline lead-generation techniques involve participating in trade shows, print advertising, direct mail campaigns, etc.
If you truly want to generate high-quality leads and increase your business ROI, then integration of both offline and online channels is necessary. By aligning the marketing efforts, and synchronizing the data, you can create a proper cohesive customer experience for all your targeted campaigns. So, in this article, we will discuss how you can effectively combine both online and offline lead-generation strategies.
Offline Vs Online Leads
Before delving deeper into the strategies for integrating both offline and online lead generation, it’s important to understand what exactly online and offline leads are. So, here it goes,
What Are Offline Leads?
Offline leads are considered those that come from all your non-digital marketing channels. For instance, you may meet someone at any business conference and have a conversation with them. Then, they become a lead through a direct email campaign. In offline leads, it’s basically pretty hard for marketers to keep track of their target audience because it never comes from the internet. However, there are a few ways to monitor them like creating custom landing pages, including them on any printed marketing materials, etc. Also, offline leads may come from word-of-mouth marketing.
What Are Online Leads?
Online leads are considered those who landed on your digital marketing channels from an online campaign. Online leads may come from blogs, websites, social media platforms, email marketing, and many more. There are many high-quality leads that you may get from online lead generation. In fact, these leads may also come from landing pages or many surveys. Both online and offline lead generation are necessary if you want to drive your business towards success.
How to Combine Both Offline & Online Lead Generation?
Integrate Content Marketing
In lead generation, both in the B2B and B2C industries, content marketing is still ruling the game. So, it’s important to find ways to integrate content marketing for both your online and offline lead generation. But, how do you do that? Well, you can create the most compelling and click-worthy content for your digital channels to capture potential customers.
Then, you can use similar content for offline marketing materials like catalogs, brochures, flyers, etc. Repurposing your online content for offline materials can not only help you gain more customers but also save your cost for generating leads. This is a killer strategy that you can use for integrating your online and offline lead generation.
Linking Your Online & Offline Marketing Assets
Another best way to integrate online and offline lead generation is to link both your marketing assets. Because, even if you’re participating in trade shows or any in-person events, it’s not always possible to collect relevant information from potential customers due to the busy schedule. But, many of the marketers hand out business cards to their potential customers.
In this case, if you want to integrate online and offline marketing strategies, then it would be best to provide your website, email addresses, or any social media links to these materials. You can include a URL to custom landing pages for your offline customers. It will become easier for customers to track you after the event. It is in fact used by most of the major brands who are looking forward to growing their businesses rapidly.
Strategizing Your Email Marketing
Well, when it comes to B2B lead generation, email marketing is one of the most popular choices for marketers. However, when you want to integrate both online and offline email marketing, there are a few things you need to know. It will help you generate more benefits from your email marketing campaign. The first thing to note is that if you’re addressing a potential customer whom you have met offline, then in the email you can mention how you met him after referring him by his first name.
In addition, you can apply similar email marketing tactics for your offline printed materials. For example, you can include the first name of the lead in offline marketing materials like data sheets, flyers, brochures, etc. However, it’s important that you always differentiate between offline and online leads while running an email campaign. For that, you can add online contacts to one email list and offline to another. It will help you segment both audience.
The End Goal
Although the lead generation strategies for online and offline contacts are entirely different. But, all these leads will end up in the conversion funnel. So, it’s important to make full use of published content, create custom landing pages, provide detailed contact information, personalize emails whenever generating any offline leads, etc. Moreover, if you take the right lead generation strategy at the right touchpoint, then it will help you build a strong relationship with your customers. But, making the perfect lead generation strategy and taking the right approach can be pretty challenging. This is why SocialBloom is here to help. Being a renowned lead generation agency in the United States, we have been helping clients across the globe. If you need any professional help regarding B2B lead generation, we have the best experts to help you out. To know more, schedule a discovery call with us now!