How to Promote Your Online Work Offline

You use social media to promote your business and you conduct business in person. Both are important for the success of your business. How do you provide your traditional promotion with a way to access your online promotion?

Even though people do a great deal of business online, there is a lot more that people do offline (or in person). In order to be truly successful in business, you need to find a way to integrate your online business efforts with your in-person business dealings and relationships. So, how do you promote your online business when you are doing traditional business promotion?

• Make business cards that lead people to online events: The information on your business card must be precise and extremely effective at drawing people to you. A great way to bring the business that you conduct in person together with your online efforts is to include a special code and/or Facebook Fan Page, which will give people a discount to events that you have or will organize in the future.
• Combine your web presence with traditional advertising: If you are running a traditional advertisement in a newspaper, magazine, etc, you can include your business’s Twitter handle, iPhone App, or Facebook page. You can also include the URL to your website on your advertisement. People nowadays really like to be able to check out your website before they go any further with you.
• Combine online features with in-person events: Many companies have been getting together lately as a group and are blogging about each other. All sorts of valuable and informative information can come from this. Another great vehicle is photos or short videos. If your business is having an event, you can film or photograph people using your products and then you can post the photos and/or video on your business’s Facebook Fan Page. The nice thing about that is that people don’t actually have to attend the event in person in order to participate.
• Use your car or truck as a billboard: This is an excellent way to combine online and offline efforts. Numerous business owners recognize how important it is to get involved with social media to increase the exposure of their offerings and reputation.
• Be as creative as possible: There are so many ways to offer online information (including ways to reach you) with your traditional advertising. You should make the promotional effort as interesting and as creative as possible. If it is interesting, you will attract more people.

Combining your online and traditional promotion for your business is the most effective approach that you can take when it comes to achieving success for your business. Your objective should be to combine the two in a way that is a dramatic improvement over only using one or the other. Both traditional and online promotion are essential and if done correctly, the two approaches should complement and enhance each other and they should be effective enough to really touch people and make them want to be involved. The initial promotion is just the beginning. Its purpose is to get people interested and wanting more. The next step is for them to continue to pursue information about your business online.