The Small Business Online Marketing Handbook: Converting Online Conversations to Offline Sales

Chapter 3

Connecting Your Offline Business with Your Online Presence

Maintaining continuity across key aspects of your offline and online worlds is necessary not only to create a consistent customer experience for online browsers but also to convert them to offline shoppers. The challenge that people often have with managing their online presence is that what is happening online is not actually a reflection of what's happening offline, and vice versa. This is usually because businesses tend to manage these two things separately, or consider one to be an afterthought, which keeps them out of sync.

In this chapter, we discuss a few things to watch out for in terms of keeping these two aspects of business connected. We also introduce some best practices that we've seen some of our customers implement in the field. But before you dive in, you must first execute the core components of your online reputation plan. Once you've covered the basics of creating, managing, and monitoring your online reputation, then you're ready to take the next step of integrating these assets into your daily offline business.

Design Holistic Marketing Promotions

It can initially seem like somewhat of a burden to have to manage both your offline and online worlds. You can adjust your mindset, however, by viewing your in-store and offline marketing as an extension or a complement to your online and social marketing efforts. In reality, every promotion or marketing piece you put out into the world will likely ...