The Importance of Handling Leads Digitally in Offline Marketing

A perfect marketing strategy does not exist.

You know what?

That statement is a myth!

A perfect marketing strategy exists but what doesn’t is the perfect execution of it. You may be the most creative person in your team and your ideas are capable of revolutionizing the brand you’re working for but if you don’t execute your idea, what’s the whole point?

Also, what most people fail to acknowledge is that branding, advertising and marketing (these are three different terms if you didn’t know) are all like balanced diets. They are made of essential resources that are vital for a business to sustain. What many people don’t understand is that they cannot prioritize one strategy over others. For instance, one of my friends back in town is a great marketing strategist. However, he was a firm believer of the fact that he doesn’t require offline marketing strategies for the business he was working with. While initially his digital marketing efforts gave him leads, everything stagnated after a point. He was concerned and stressed out because his ideas were good and working but it had reached a point that could no longer grow.

It was at that time he came up to me and shared his concern. I noticed two major problems with his strategy. The first one was that he gave most of his time and attention to digital marketing. That is good, no doubt but he didn’t have a purpose at that point. He was keen on getting Facebook likes and Twitter & Instagram followers for his brand, which he did, but no conversion or use of any of them. He had just one or two strategies for offline marketing for a business that needed more offline strategies.

Driven away by the digital marketing trend, he also failed to have a proper lead tracking and management facility in place because of which he lost even the potential leads he managed to generate with his one or two offline ideas. Now, this was my next big concern. With crucial parts of a marketing strategy missing, how do you expect a business to flourish and not stagnate?

At this point, let me just remind you that a good marketing or brand building strategy is a blend of both online and offline strategies. Though you can prioritize one over the other, you cannot deprive each of the weightage each deserves. If you think it’s a digital world and everything works best online and you don’t need to stress too much on offline mediums, you’re wrong. People are still oldschool and are not completely out of offline channels today. It’s the common people we are catering to and if you don’t respect their position and demand, you can never build your brand.

If you don’t have a proper lead management facility in place for your offline marketing strategies, the effort and time you’re dedicating to it will go futile. Moreover, you’ll lose what your working for – leads. That’s why we recommend having a proper medium as the backbone of your offline strategies to track, respond and manage your leads and nurture them.

If you’ve set up a stall at a convention, ensure you have a laptop with you to get the contact details of the leads you generate there. Record their names, email addresses, phone numbers and other fields and turn on sync to immediately save them on cloud. This will help your sales team at the office to immediately get in touch with them. Have a proper nurture sequence in place to keep your new leads engaged and informed of your brand and their concern and connect with them.

If it’s a print ad that you’ve published, get it out with a QR code that allows people to scan and get your potential lead back to the digital medium, making it easier to track and respond. Similarly, every offline strategy can be tied back to an effective lead management system for efficient handling and our next post is exactly going to be on that. Stay tuned for some expert tips and strategies coming your way.