Online And Offline Presence Building

It’s a buzzword phrase business folks hear all the time these days – “you need to expand your presence!” Unfortunately, while this action seems to be an agreed upon need in the digital world, not as many people full understand what it means.

In reality, expanding a business presence online or off is about developing and building brand awareness and reputation. It’s about developing a name, service delivery, and recognition that is synonymous in consumers’ minds with a particular product, need or service. So every time people think about a particular tool, the company’s name comes up immediately instead of just a generic tool.

While the online side of things involves websites and social media presence, businesses shouldn’t forget about the realtime, real world side of things. Local and regional presence has been developed for decades with the use of fliers, advertisement, mailers, newsletters and multiple other print options. No surprise, business sales and revenue still comes from people remembering about a coupon, an address on a pen or notepad, or seeing an add on a billboard on the side of the highway or commute road.

Another aspect about expanding presence is that, unlike the digital world, an offline presence can remain a bit more static. Time moves slower for printed material, so there’s not as much need to keep updating information to stay on a particular search engine. The biggest search engine in the print world is the local yellow pages phone book, and that only gets updated once a year.

So if your business is looking to boost its name, the digital world is a fine place to do so, but don’t forget printed hardcopy marketing tools as well. Sometimes the old tried and true is still a better path to take, especially when building local name recognition.