Offline Promotions
This week, I worked with a client on a site that needed to debut within a matter of hours. The group had already secured a 3-minute spot in Thursday’s BYU vs. Wyoming game which would air 20 minutes before kickoff and they wanted a site to be ready because of the ad message. It’s been nearly a day since that ad aired and the site stats show that there has been very little traffic as a result.
The key to offline promotions of a website is in general branding principles. Folks usually can remember the ad and what it was about. But give them less than an hour most of the time, and they can’t tell you what the web address was, even if it’s a good one. The same rules apply to branding in general of new products. There have been some seriously funny Super Bowl ads in the past that everyone can recite verbatim—except for the part about the company’s name. It takes a lot of money and time to get a brand name off the ground.
I was commuting along the freeway here in Utah everyday during the summer and I passed by a billboard that read simply:
“Google what?” doba.com
It was a well-targeted ad, I thought, if they are going after people like me. I was curious, who would act so audacious in an ad when Google is the obvious leader for all things internet? But for the life of me, by the time I got to work just 20 minutes later, I couldn’t remember the address. I tried variations, but never had the time or patience to try enough.
You can’t do much better than that ad. But it was a new company I hadn’t heard of before and it took a few days of seeing the sign to get the company name right. So in offline promoting of online content, remember to create frequency. Run that ad many times before you expect to see a rise in any traffic.
And, for an even better solution, do more online promoting of your site than offline.
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