Take Note of These 3 Offline Marketing Trends for 2021

28% of marketers say they reduced their traditional advertising budget to fund digital marketing activities. Why should you care about that? Because their focus isn’t on offline marketing, so there’s a real opportunity to establish your brand in an offline capacity.

We’re not advocating binning your digital marketing efforts, far from it. But we reckon if you just gave this blog a quick glance, you’d realise you could be missing out on many chances to find and engage your target audience or boost your brand awareness — or maybe both!

How exciting, let’s find out more.

Building your brand in the community

Throughout COVID, communities demonstrated how powerful working together can be. Whether it’s supporting local food delivery initiatives or volunteering time at the local vaccination centre. The community has played a big part in how we all got through the last 12 months together.

For example, through COVID, we worked on a client campaign handing out branded hand sanitiser to communities across Chicago. This proactive public health campaign drove brand awareness for our client and supported people when they needed it most. Take a look at our campaign video.

But as the world starts opening back up, there’s a real opportunity for your organisation to get involved in its local community setting. Whether it’s sponsoring the local football team or taking part in a community gardening project — associating your business with helping the community will help you raise your brand profile and get you some good PR opportunities, too.

The aim of the game is to feel good about what your company stands for. But it’s also a great feeling when you get noticed for the good you do. Find what your audience is passionate about and get involved in local projects. For example, if your audience is packed with millennials, Linkfluence found seven values this demographic stands for: animal rights, feminism, sustainability, environmental protection, anti-racism, inclusiveness, and LGBT rights.

So, get out there and find a common passion between you and your audience — and don’t forget to shout about the good stuff you’re doing.

Strategic flyer distribution

Connecting offline and online marketing can be the key to getting audiences to interact and acknowledge your brand wherever they go. Just because your audience might hang out online doesn’t mean you can find out where they visit offline and share your marketing messages in person.

You might think flyer marketing is pointless, immeasurable, and time-consuming. But you’d be wrong. On-street leaflet marketing, direct mail or car hangers, to name a few, can massively increase customer acquisition, skyrocket sales and improve brand awareness. Don’t believe us? Uber Eats reached 45 million people with their leaflet delivery campaign and acquired 750 thousand new users. Impressive, right? Imagine all those people just waiting to spend their money on your promotion.

To compete in the big leagues, your brand has to be noticeable everywhere, not just through online channels — and leaflet marketing could be a way to do this.

Guerrilla marketing campaigns

The phrase originates from “guerrilla warfare” — meaning the element of surprise. Guerrilla marketing was most popular back in October of 2004, as you can see from the graph below. The graph also shows how the term guerrilla marketing isn’t really searched for too much now, which could present an opportunity for your brand.

Source: Google Trends

Following the leader and imitating tactics can work well for digital marketing strategies such as SEO or social media, but when it comes to guerrilla marketing, you have a chance to be creative for relatively little cost.

A great example of guerrilla marketing is the kitchen roll brand Bounty. They created giant plastic items and placed them around the high street. Items included a spilt coffee and an ice cream that looked like it was melting into the pavement, with a sign next to them saying, “Makes small work of BIG spills.”

Start thinking outside the box for cost-effective, big-impact marketing strategies. Don’t forget to monitor press and social coverage about your big campaign so you can effectively measure results.

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Shelly Parker

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