CHAPTER 14 Bridging the online offline gap

You can't ignore it. Marketing is the driving force behind putting your product in front of your target audience. It doesn't matter whether you're a one-man band, or a company with a fully-fledged marketing department, to be competitive you will need to adopt new marketing skills that combine the best in online and offline promotion.

It's easy to assume that the Net is a cheaper and better way of marketing yourself than the alternatives and actually there's a lot to be said for that view. A 20,000 piece mail shot, which - including design and printing - would cost approximately Ј11,200. And there would be no guarantee that the person receiving your mail shot wants the services your company provides. But to reach 20,000 people who will actually visit your website with overture would cost Ј2,000, and all of these people will be looking for the products and services you offer. You will therefore receive a much higher return on your investment.

Identify objectives

The first thing to do when looking at your online marketing is to consider your objectives. Do you actually want to build your brand or your business with your site?

People with different online brands have often used them to test the water.

Some companies take it further than testing the water, developing new brands entirely positioned around the internet channel - for example, www.fireandwater.com is actually publisher Harper Collins and www.handbag.co.uk was jointly set up by Boots.

There are plenty of high profile examples in which consistency has been jettisoned in a bid to build a separate brand for the new medium. Egg, for example, is effectively the online presence of the Prudential, and Smile is more or less the Co-Operative Bank. Both these companies have used clever marketing and targeting, focusing on online methods to appeal to a younger, internet savvy and financially independent segment.

Initially a lot of companies were aware of the risk to their brand equity which led a lot of them to develop online brands. It gave them a good start but I'm not sure how much they'll be able to build on it.

Egg's growth to date shows they're not doing such a bad job, particularly through links with other 'young' brands such as pharmacy2u.co.uk. However, other online brands are being merged with their more established offline identities. B&Q launched on the internet as www.diy.com, but type that into your browser now and you'll be directed to a site that's very firmly branded as B&Q.

The technology itself is making a powerful difference, because the way search engines work is changing. As they get smarter they're picking up on the established brands, and they're also looking at the frequency with which they're referred to by other sites. Hence finding B&Q by typing 'diy' into Google would probably work whether it owned diy.com or not.

Back to basics

Marketing online isn't a mystical art and it needs to be approached with sound design basics. The Chartered Institute of Marketing is finding that its current logo doesn't translate particularly well to the computer screen. Designed before the web was truly a consideration, this isn't anyone's fault but it will need remedying nonetheless.

Even now that the internet has been firmly established, it's possible to end up with a design that dilutes rather than enhances your existing marketing efforts.

Customer communication

The other vital consideration is that the customer, as in the offline world, comes first - and unless you're a pure-play e-commerce company, they don't want to feel as though they're dealing with two separate businesses.

Decisions, decisions

Getting an online marketing campaign right can be tricky. You could enrol yourself on a course from the CIM or the Institute of Direct Marketing, but these will take time.

You will also have to decide between handling the campaign in-house or outsourcing it to an agency - remember to not only focus on costs, but on quality, design, track ability and the long-term benefits.

It's vital to have an understanding of the brand before beginning any website project, and by brand I don't just mean the graphical representation but also the way the site navigates, the type of words and sentences used, the tone of voice, the style of the images, the relevance of the content and the general functions.

It's amazing how many businesses get this wrong. The majority of the time, when a website fails to communicate effectively it is generally due to the developers and sometimes the brand owners not understanding what the brand is and what it stands for. The website development company needs to be immersed in all other forms of brand communication, making sure they know why a specific style of image is used, ensuring they understand the target audiences.

Preparing for this sort of exercise isn't rocket science, as long as you're methodical. The briefing for whoever is to take your brand online should include every last detail; the graphical boundaries need to be understood right down to the shades of colour that may or may not be used.

Just as crucially, you will need to find an exceptional copywriter. Content that is not written in the style of the brand is one of the most common ways to miss-communicate your brand online, it is all too easy to say one thing with a picture and miss-communicate it with words.

Someone with a creative or marketing focus needs to 'own' the website, rather than the IT department, to keep online communications aligned with overall communication strategy. Here is a four-point checklist that will help:
Is the site likeable?
Is it important to the user - does it fulfill a need?
Is it trustworthy?
Is it inspiring?

Legal requirements

When you are engaging in online marketing, it's also worth involving legal experts. If you're marketing to someone in any way you're almost inevitably going to use their personal details, whether their email addresses or more than that - so the Data Protection Act (DPA) applies.

This will be true of any marketing campaign, but more unique to the online world is the Electronic Commerce Directive from the EU, which has similar disclosure obligations to the DPA, and the Distance Selling Directive. The latter outlines your obligations to tell the customer how to get in touch with you offline and to ensure they can back out of a deal if they want to within a cooling-off period; these details need to be in emails, on websites and on any marketing SMS.

Sending unsolicited emails to people is right out under these directives, although if you've sold them something similar before then you can revisit an existing customer - but even then there are grey areas. The question will be whether, if someone has bought a kettle from you, you can sell them a TV - or if you've sold them an extended warranty whether you can sell them another financial product.

International trading attracts its own pitfalls as well as opportunities. If you are taking advantage of global trading then you can easily be exposed to global legal risks. For example in some countries you can't market to children or market at all on Sundays. No matter how watertight your knowledge of UK trading laws may be, it's simply not commercially practicable to eliminate all of these, but there is a lot that companies can do to minimise them, this is one area where getting expert legal advice should not be treated as an optional extra.

For advice on this sort of pitfall and others it's well worth talking to or visiting UK Online for Business, the Government agency that promotes electronic business within the UK and which has a team of specialist advisors operating in Business Links, Chambers of Commerce and other standard sources of business advice.

The Advertising Standards Authority website is www.asa.org.uk, there are guidelines on international trading at TradeUK and independent sites such as www.clearlybusiness.co.uk and www.clickz.com offer excellent all-round online marketing advice.

Success factors

The main message here is to remember that whether you engage in online or offline marketing, there are certain key practical considerations you need to include. Audience, message, response method and legal constraints are some of the main factors. Where you're running online and offline marketing promotions in parallel, consistency across the two in terms of brand and identity will ensure that your customer's perception of your business is clear and unified.

There are distinct advantages to every different component of the promotional mix and the secret is to use those mediums that will best target and persuade your ideal market. Increasingly, as the buying public becomes more competent and confident at buying online, this market is opening up even wider opportunities for the small and nimble business - make sure you're best positioned to take advantage!
Checklist - Brand integrity and how to achieve it

o Keep your brand consistent across all media unless you have a specific reason for not doing so.
o Don't make silly mistakes - companies quoting a wrong price on a website have found that their whole brand image can suffer as a result.
o Remember to look beyond the image - the wording on your website will affect your brand as much as the pictures. Don't be too stuffy if you're talking to youths, don't be casual if you're talking to businesses.
o Ensure your brief to your design company is thorough and they understand the branding objective at all levels - talk to existing customers and find out whether the agency's input complemented or competed with the initial brief.
o Make things clear - if a price is a web-only promotion label it clearly so your customer doesn't expect it in your real premises.
o Make sure your logos look great on screen as well as on paper.

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