While traditional reliable marketing methods like hoardings, flyer distribution, and print advertising have been behind successful marketing campaigns, the rise of digital marketing channels presents an opportunity to scale business growth. As the digital landscape continues to evolve quickly, businesses that have traditionally relied on and thrived on offline marketing strategies are facing a pivotal moment. Yet, for many businesses—especially those deeply rooted in offline practices—there is an evident hesitation around making the leap into digital marketing.
This hesitation is understandable with a lot of tech jargon terms like crawlers, spiders, indexed pages, backlinks, domain authority, quality score, schema, etc that might make you feel disconnected from the tangible strategies familiar to seasoned marketers. However, what if we told you that the mainstream digital strategies are not as different from your offline efforts as they might appear?
In this article, we’ll demystify the world of digital marketing by drawing direct parallels to offline marketing practices that business development and marketing teams are already familiar with. For instance, consider how local SEO is the digital counterpart to distributing pamphlets in your community—both aim to make your business known to local customers. Or think of search engine marketing (SEM) as the digital version of placing ads in local newspapers, but with the added benefit of reaching people precisely when they are searching for your product or service.
Our objective is simple: to show that digital marketing is not a departure from what you already know, but rather an expansion—a powerful tool that can amplify your existing efforts. By embracing these digital channels, businesses can tap into new opportunities, refine their targeting strategies, and ultimately, stay ahead of the competition. So, whether you’re a business developer pushing for growth or an offline marketer looking to expand your toolkit, understanding and adopting digital marketing is not just an option—it’s a necessity.
Digital Marketing Channels
Flyer Distribution vis-à-vis Local SEO: A lot of businesses promote their business with flyer distribution in their locality to create brand awareness and demand for their product. Another way to scale is through appearing on local results with the help of local search engine optimization. Here’s how it works:
On Google: Here’s an example of how different brands appear when a person is looking for carpet cleaning services in Auckland:
On Google Maps: If you are looking at Google Maps, here’s how brands will appear on the results.
Prime Locations vis-a-vis SEO: When a potential customer is in the market looking for a product, he’s drawn to the most prime stores in a particular location.
SEO works in the same way. When a person is looking for a product or service on Google, SEO helps the business website rank in prominent spots on Google. By optimizing the website correctly, potential customers can be directed to the website.
Ads vis-à-vis SEM: To promote a business or event through offline marketing, one can buy ad space in magazines or newspapers, or similar mediums. However, that effort can be boosted at much less cost through Search Engine Marketing (SEM). When a person is looking for a product or service on Google, you can run sponsored ads which will typically show at the top even before the organic results appear. A notable thing to note is that you don’t have to pay for your ads to appear but only if a person clicks on your ad, hence making Search Engine Marketing one of the best marketing channels.
Networking vis-à-vis Social Media Marketing: In a networking event, you build relationships, and engage with people. Social media marketing is somewhat similar as you build your page/community and try to build relationships with customers and engage with them. If you want to explore on how social media marketing can help SMEs, here’s a case study featuring brands that have succeeded with Facebook marketing: https://www.facebook.com/business/success/categories/small-business
Partnerships vis-a-vis Affiliates: We all have worked with mutual partnerships helping each other. A hotel business can have partnerships with travel agents.
Following the same rules, such a relationship from an online perspective is an affiliate relationship. In affiliate partnership, a brand can build relationships with other websites that can drive business to them. The partnerships are structured in many ways depending on the business- website leads, sales, visibility, and more. For a K-12 school brand, one of the well-known affiliate partners is https://www.international-schools-database.com/.
For your brand, you can also build affiliate partners by looking for businesses that complement you. Insurance aggregators are another example of an affiliate partnership.
Direct Mail vis-à-vis Email Marketing: In traditional marketing, once details of the customer are acquired, direct mails are sent to bring them from the awareness stage to the intent/purchase stage.
Email marketing is another way to do it in a much faster and efficient manner. Email marketing not only allows you to send emails, but also build relationships with potential customers through a series of nurture emails. In one of our previous articles, we have covered how you can use HubSpot (customer relationship software) which can help you to build and engage with your customers.