Ryan Wofford

Old School Media Image via Wikipedia

This article brings to light the necessity, even in the role of a web 2.0 demand generation strategist, for an offline strategy.

As I was meeting with a client the other day, who was in charge of his company’s online marketing destiny, I posed the question, “Where do your clients live?” He quickly began to reply “well, we’re an SaaS company… we hope they live on the web” and I had to interrupt, “what if they don’t?”

As he backpedaled, he then began to tell me to think of their customers, in fact, as the “Rust Belt“. “This is no good,” I thought. We need an offline strategy. I need to show these folks that we can win this battle old school style… We can rock this lo-fi, no-tech scene too.

Then, I had an idea… we can get our promo message out on CD or DVD, like I used to trying to get gigs.

I decided we would try something that looked like this:

Vertical Market Demo

By following this course, we could not only spread our brand message, but then convert offline users into online users by driving them to a conversion point on the web. Sure, the chart and the message needs a little refinement, but the idea is there, and it is a great idea to have a supplemental offline strategy to go with your web presence.

How do you supplement your online strategies when you have to take them offline?