Successfully marketing your business involves more than just having a website. Traditional (but still effective!) ways to promote your business offline include printing brochures, advertising in magazines, distributing email newsletters and sending out direct mail. To push people to your website, these offline marketing methods are ideal. They help get people talking and generate traffic, increase page views and, ultimately, increase sales.
Streamlining your web copy and offline marketing strategy
For this reason, it’s incredibly important that your offline marketing material and website work in tune with one another. Effective offline marketing will drive potential customers to your site like a ‘hook’; it makes people curious to find out more. When someone sees a brochure or an advert for something they like, their first reaction will be to visit the company’s website for more information.
Consequently, what the customer then finds at your website becomes extremely important. Not only does it reflect your business and make a lasting impression, but more significantly, it is usually the deal-breaker as to whether a customer chooses to contact you or not.
So while maintaining good design and user-friendly navigation, you MUST make the copy on your site as informative, engaging, useful and web-friendly as possible. A bit of a no-brainer really, but it is unbelievable how many businesses get this wrong.
FAIL: How to NOT write copy for your website
A huge mistake that many companies make when creating or revamping their website is that they rerun text from existing brochures and ads. This is a big no-no. You should always use your website as an opportunity to elaborate on your existing offline marketing material.
Don’t take the easy route and just copy and paste what you’ve already got. Add to it; back it up with valuable information. Write about your business, what you do, your product, or any related topic — anything to help convince the reader why they should buy something from you, or simply make contact.
If your site is almost identical to your brochure or printed advert, it adds nothing to what the customer has already seen. Remember that one of the core objectives of offline marketing is to drive customers to your website for more comprehensive information. If there’s nothing else on there for them to read, they’ll most likely lose interest and look elsewhere. A plain and uninteresting site will bore your potential customers and they’ll exit immediately, unlikely to return. Your chances of making a sale disappear, and their valuable visit turns into a wasted opportunity.
Make that sale! The benefit of capturing your reader’s attention
The exciting part for businesses is that if you are successful in generating (and maintaining!) a customer’s interest online, there is a huge chance you will make a sale. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at least 61% of internet browsers purchase goods and/or services online. Furthermore, 71% of these online buyers are between the ages of 25 and 34, the bracket with the highest level of disposable income — perfect if your target market happens to fit this demographic.
So next time you’re thinking of writing copy for your website, don’t cut corners and rerun what you’ve already got. Double check what’s written on your offline marketing material and build on it.
When executed properly, an optimised website combined with offline marketing can work brilliantly together. Just make sure you add valuable information to nail your customer’s interest if you want to make a sale!
