Offline Businesses - Why Offline Businesses Need an Online Presence

When the World Wide Web debuted in 1994, it was the first graphical interface for accessing the Internet for most people, and all the rules changed. From it's inception as ARPANet in 1963, the Internet had been text-based and accessible only to those who knew the UNIX commands necessary to navigate the various online servers. For offline businesses, the biggest change was that online marketing was now allowed - commercial activities had been pretty much taboo until then.

For the first few years only the most avant-garde of the business world embraced the Internet, and for the most part offline businesses just didn't understand it well enough to get more than slightly involved. But as with every new technology, offline businesses started to see friends and competitors doing well with it, customers started asking if they had an online presence, and soon more and more were getting into online marketing in one form or another.

Over a decade later, the World Wide Web is still gaining in popularity, still growing exponentially, and has in fact become an almost mandatory marketing medium for large and small business entrepreneurs, merchants and corporations. From realtors to arms manufacturers and from herbalists to governments, the Internet has become one of the, if not the, most powerful advertising and marketing vehicle in history. For that reason alone, offline businesses MUST have an online presence to maintain their status quo, and especially to build market share or market area.

But the growth to billions, possibly trillions of dollars spent in online marketing today has also mean a drop in spending at the traditional offline media - newspapers are in desperate times, radio and TV stations are going under in the US alone at a rate of about 1 per week. Reports showing consumers spending less time reading newspapers and magazines, watching less television and listening less to radios in favor of time online are coming out regularly, and as the market base erodes for each of these media, so does the response to advertising in those vehicles. It's become a vicious downward spiral for offline media, one many or most won't survive.

And that's the core issue when offline businesses consider going online - the buying public is spending more and more time there, spending more and more of their money there, and doing their consumer research there before heading out to source something locally. If you don't have a good, solid presence online, how can you be expected to show up in their research? Whether it's a purchasing department looking to place contracts for hundreds of millions or a hungry consumer looking for an exotic restaurant in their town, if they don't see you they won't know you exist. Think about it - when was the last time YOU looked anything up in the yellow pages?

One caveat - it's easy for offline businesses to sink tens of thousands of dollars into fancy web sites and the like and not see much, if any, return for their money. Beware of design services providers who use recent graduates conversant in all the latest technologies but devoid of any marketing experience. You wouldn't send a recent graduate with no business experience to call on your top clients, so avoid making that same mistake as you bring your offline business online!

Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in online marketing through his Internet Marketing Coaching and his Affiliate Marketing Coaching programs. Give your online marketing the PowerStart it needs today - enroll now!