All too often people fail to see the connection between their online and offline part of the business. This can and has been detrimental to businesses that want to sell a product or service that is tangible and offline. Conversions are always low even though lots of marketing has been made. One has probably created a brand and image for oneself or even at least awareness among the public but never been able to capture that high conversion rate. Well, maybe your product or service isn’t specific enough and your target market isn’t interested in it. However, if you are fully confident that your product or service should be doing well in the market you are aiming at then it’s probably your online and offline integration.

Integration is pivotal in strengthening your brand. Imagine that you were intrigued with a product that was advertised on the newspaper or the TV and you decided to go online to search for it. However, you weren’t able to find the product or even the promoter’s name. How disappointed and frustrated would you feel? Then, you would stop searching and eventually forget about it or, in a worse scenario from the promoter’s perspective; you would stumble upon the competitor of the product.

Where do I start? The first place you can look into is the cohesiveness of the message you want to propagate to others. Choose a strong and clear message and be sure to use it in every major advertising medium. By this way, potential customers would be able to relate and understand easier. The message can also come in a form of an image or video. Before you start the campaign, make sure there are proper measuring tools in place and a controlled experiment conducted to check for the effectiveness.

Once you are ready to start your campaign for the product or service, ensure that there are clear calls-to-action for potential customers. What do you want your customers to do? For example, KFC is trying to promote a new discount coupon that they have installed for customers. KFC will have calls-to-action that requests customers to ‘visit the website’ or ‘like their Facebook page’. Next is to use a simple URL that is related to your product or service. A good example would be fingerlickingood.com. This redirects users to your real landing page. Moving on, use paid search to advertise your products. Be sure that people are able to find your products when they need to. Look for your opportunities to expand your keywords to get more hits. Of course, after redirecting, we wouldn’t want our potential customers to bounce. Suck them in with great unison visuals from your offline ads and an easy navigation to conversion. Most importantly, feature your product prominently to catch the user’s attention.

Other ways to connect with offline customers are using QR codes, hashtags on social media websites and out of the ordinary advertising like a 10 foot tall vending machine or a boxing ring in the middle of a busy street.

Once you get the traffic that you need, remember to have nets to capture details of these customers. Knowing the information of the customers that you have is really important to identify if your campaign has been successful or not. Were you able to catch the market you were aiming for? What are the demographics of the market you captured?

All of these aside, we come back to the point of the importance of having offline and online integration. Integration between these two is bound to get you a higher conversion rate because it is like holding customers’ hand from the billboard advertisement up to when they click the ‘Buy’ button on your website. The word integration is like a bridge that helps the journey.