If you want to increase traffic and send more clients and prospective clients to your website, what’s the best media to use?

At Octavian we have solutions to help with email marketing, social media, search engine optimisation and a host of other options. All of these work and will have varying degrees of return depending on your type of business and the amount of effort put in to make them effective. One of the most obvious methods though, and one that’s often overlooked, is the power of using printed media in the form of direct mail or printed entry forms.

Too many businesses (and printers are as guilty of this as anyone else) make the assumption that online and offline media don’t mix. This couldn’t be further from the truth in my experience. The printed word still caries a lot of weight with consumers and apart from making them aware of your site in the first place, also has a re-enforcing effect on the message you are trying to convey.

So how do you use printed materials to drive traffic?

Here are a few ideas:

• Make a compelling offer that gives people a reason to visit your site. This needs to be something that is of value to them such as discount coupons, special offers, a free trial or something similar. Once you have them on your site, you can invite them to join your mailing list in order to receive news of more offers.
• Make what you’re asking them to do very clear and then make it easy to find on your site. For example, go to www.mycompany.com and fill in our on line survey to receive a 10% discount voucher.
• Have a postcard printed that invites your customers to fill in their details to be added to a monthly prize draw. Use the opportunity for some market research at the same time by asking them for their comments on your products and services, this might also produce some good testimonials for you to use on your site.
• Make a quarterly printed newsletter with highlights from the content on your website and include a competition that can be either by post or on your site.

Ann integrated approach is often the best way to increase awareness of your brand and making the message consistent across printed and digital media is something we would advise all our clients to do.

We have applications that plug into all our Octavian sites that will help with the suggestions here including voucher codes from our e-commerce solution, email marketing and form building to help you create surveys and competitions etc.

If you would like more help with any of the above, please give Octavian a call on 01756 636106 or use our contact form.