Does Your Offline Advertising Effectively Market You Online?

Every day I receive several pieces of junk mail in my mailbox.  Everything from coupons for restaurants, to car dealerships, to even financial institutions. When time allows I like to look at these printed materials and see how companies are marketing offline to bring people onto their online sphere.

Today, I received 2 pieces of mail. One for a local car dealership, and one for Charles Schwab. Unfortunately in my opinion, I don’t think either did a good job marketing in there printed material.  See images below:

In the Kia advertisement, it feels as if it was a last second thought.  The social media icons were placed in the bottom in a very sloppy graphic design as very small icons. Nowhere in the ad does it say how to find them on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.

The Charles Schwab ad had a nice QR code on the back left panel of their recent magazine.  However, when I scanned the code expecting to watch a demo of the Schwab Global Account, all I received was a non-mobilized web page. To see any content on my Android phone I had to scroll left to right, pinch and zoom and it was a complete nightmare.

I wish I could say this is a rare thing to see, but the unfortunate is that this stuff happens every day.  So, in closing, before you send out your next piece of offline marketing to your audience, ask yourself if your online marketing on that piece of paper, billboard, or sign is going to be  effective at driving the audience from an offline encounter to an online relationship.