Taking internet marketing offline

Often as a SEO/Internet Marketer the focus remains directly on - the internet.

Recently, however, I’ve been changing my promotional focus to - offline.

Point being, the internet has become such an integral part of life for many people, that by generating conversations offline, it translates into conversations - and links - online.

One way to do this is to contact relevant outlets with a story of potential interest or direct benefit to their users.

I’m still in the early stages, but already this weekend I’ve achieved news coverage by the BBC about one of my marketing projects.

Not only did I get a dedicated full-page article on BBC News, it also included a direct link from the BBC website.

The success of that works at multiple levels - exposure to a mass audience, take-up by targeted visitors, and a great SEO link to boot.

SEO has always been about delivering targeted traffic from search engines.

But SEO remains a specialist subset of Internet Marketing, as a way of driving targeted visitors to a website while maintaining great Return on Investment (ROI).

Point is, you can deliver that targeted traffic by creating offline conversations that translate into online conversations, which then deliver online marketing benefits in terms of traffic and links.

And in doing so, the whole Internet Marketing doesn’t have to be fixated on trying to capture traffic on a keyword basis.

Just as search engines have trouble determining the intent of a search, so SEO suffers from targeting keyword search rankings where the searcher’s intents may not be properly targeted.

While targeting Longtail traffic is one strategy for better capturing targeted users, the bottom line is that simply generating conversation is even better.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell separates the viral process into three key vectors:

• Mavens
• Connectors
• Salesmen

Mavens are those who collect information, Connectors distribute it, and Salesmen preach it to the masses.

In an internet marketing process, the Maven is the marketing company, the Connector is the media outlet (or similar), and Salesmen are the people who talk about the story.

However, even if the ultimate goal is online Salesmen linking to a target website, the viral process doesn’t have to start online.

And that’s the key point to underline here.

Whatever the medium you start the process in, if this message can reach your target audience, the medium itself becomes irrelevant - because the message itself trascends media.

Internet Marketing can too often find itself slip into thinking within carefully boxed formats, whether in terms of basic link building, tracking statistics, or web development.

But there always remains room to think outside of the box, and challenge convention, by targeting one media by starting in a completely different one.

When it fails, nobody notices. When it works - the right people notice, and your target audience is tapped.