I received an e-mail today from Business First stating they may publish a couple of my articles. This is big news for me and my firm as I’ve been trying to get published in print for a little while now in order to market the consultancy to a broader, yet localized, audience.
One of the things I try to weave into website owners’ heads is offline marketing is still important when it comes to your business. We’re still a society that reads print publications even though the subscriber numbers are coming down for almost all print media. That doesn’t mean it’s not a viable medium for marketing a business especially if you can get something published for free like an article. Technically, the article isn’t free as time is money, but your time is hopefully rewarded with an increase in business. Even if you only capture “bathroom impressions” from print media, those are still valuable hits you wouldn’t get otherwise.
It’s still more cost effective to market online since you can reach a seemingly endless prospect base, it’s real time, and you can achieve a quantifiable ROI from online marketing unlike that of television or print. Who is to say that your television commercial or print ad gets viewed as often as suggested? Since the marketing firms are against Nielsen releasing television commercial statistics (I’d love to see those numbers!), it’ll be awhile until we can put a definitive number on viewership, but we can regularly get that data online. Same with print media–how can one be sure if their article or ad receives the “impressions” or “eyeballs” the publisher suggests? It’s hard to accurately quantify those numbers, but I will gladly take the exposure print media can provide.
I’ll report back once one of my articles gets published and share the online traffic numbers after publication. It should produce a noticable spike, but there’s no way to tell until it actually happens. We’ll monitor this “campaign” just like we would an online effort.