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Get Offline and Head Outdoors

The birth of online marketing initially made a lot of people sigh with relief because it appeared that such annoying activities as getting dressed and talking to people on the telephone would no longer be necessary.

While it’s possible to conduct a successful marketing initiative on the Web only, it’s foolish to ignore other media when they can bolster your online presence and the interest in your project.

Television is a natural complement to online advertising. But not all of us can afford 30 seconds during act two of “The Office.”

My friend and outdoor advertising expert Brent Bolick pointed me to a fantastic study performed by Reagan Outdoor. It showed that in a telephone poll, only 1 percent of the greater Austin, TX, market knew that Calvin Coolidge was the 30th U.S. president. After a 60-day outdoor saturation campaign (billboards said simply “Calvin Coolidge was the 30th President” and showed a URL), that number rose to 24 percent of the market. As a control group, 30 percent of the market also knew that Rick Perry was the state’s lieutenant governor before the campaign ran. After the campaign, those numbers had not changed.

The traffic numbers were impressive, too. The site logged over 36,000 unique visits, with 5,400 people visiting the registration page. And 2,500 of the registration page’s visitors actually registered, getting a chance to win a T-shirt and a personal billboard run.

Bolick also shared some interesting data regarding the overlap between heavy commuters and search engine use. Using Arbitron data, he looked specifically at people in his market (metro Jacksonville, FL) who regularly use search engines. Nearly half of search engine users (46 percent) are considered “heavy” users of outdoor advertising as well, due to their commuting distances. So before you look askance at offline advertising, you’d be smart to figure out how it can help you.

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