Marketing Profs

The time has come to stop talking about online in isolation of offline. Any separation between the two is a thing of the past since we, as consumers, already live in a fused world. Take a look:

• When you make a purchase—let's say a TV—do you say you bought it at Best Buy-dot-com, or do you just say Best Buy?
  
  
• After you see a GEICO commercial on TV, where do you go to check rates?
  
  
• How about when you bought your last car? After the research you did online, did you enter your credit card information to have the car shipped to your house? Probably not.

Last year, a study by comScore Networks found that an average of 63% of online searchers who proceeded to complete a purchase did so offline rather than online. Just as online and offline shopping have fused into a single experience, marketers have the opportunity to follow suit by fusing their isolated marketing efforts into a single initiative.

Steps Toward Bridging Online and Offline Marketing

During the past couple of years, you've probably come across many hints on how to bridge gaps between online and offline marketing, such as companies that display unique toll-free telephone numbers online so that calls can be traced back to the user's online activity. However, while many trends have been discussed, it seems that a systematic discussion of online-offline fusion marketing is missing.

Therefore, instead of listing point solutions such as toll-free numbers, let's examine online-offline marketing from a bird's eye perspective to conquer the specific aspects relevant to your business goals.

Online-Offline Fusion Marketing Defined

We can distinguish three sophistication levels of marketing across online and offline channels:

Level 1: Online and Offline Marketing in Isolation

Surely, we all list our Web sites' URLs in every offline ad or brochure. But often promotions available in one channel cannot be redeemed in another. And most of us don't measure the success of a campaign by its impact in both online and offline channels. For example, search engine advertising is often more responsible for generating in-store sales than typically recognized in the metrics.