How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success

How do you explain how online marketing help drive offline success for businesses? It’s a tough but a crucial question to answer since most businesses are offline-based.

To earn their marketing budget, agencies need to convince them that digital platform like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, review websites, deals sites and ads could specifically help to reach their business goals.

The infographic created by our friends from KISSmetrics did a great job summarizing the statistics behind each tool with successful case studies. However, the gap between these statistics and case studies (the results) needs to be explained to help businesses understand the mechanics of social influence (the process). I got to learn this term ‘social influence’ from Pat Law, Founder of Goodstuph, a Social Influence Marketing Studio in Singapore. She explained in an interview that social influencing is about social relationships and influencer engagement.

“We foster the relation between brands and the people who matter. Who these people are depend on the brands: For example, someone who’d matter to Nike would be Mark Ong of Sabotag, and ladyironchef for Ben & Jerry’s”, as quoted from Law in an interview (with her permission).

With people who matter to the brands influencing others and creating a network effect, that is how the statistics in the infographic were driven and eventually help businesses reach their business goals. It is still the same old word-of-mouth process, only speed up by web technologies. However, note that the statistics below represents only the U.S market. In Singapore, we don’t have Yelp and most don’t use Bing Maps. In China, no one uses Twitter and Facebook. Chinese use Sina Weibo and Renren instead. So, don’t use this infographic blindly. It serves as a good summary but may not apply to your work directly.

Last but not least, marketers need to rethink what these figures mean and what they are used for. Statistics like number of retweets, traffic and impression and are good figures to back up a campaign’s success. However, there are other important factors to consider, especially on what people are saying about your brand.

“Figures are cold-metrics. We pay more attention to warm-metrics, which is what people are saying about the product or company. We look into sentiment as a whole and analyze it,” explained Pat.