A small secret, I’m a bit of a clubs junkie. At university, I am quite sure I held the record for number of clubs joined. At the beginning of each semester, I’d easily have joined up to about ten and sometimes even twenty clubs from everything from the Soccer club to the Swedish club (I don’t even play soccer and I’m not Swedish!). The cool thing about the internet is that there are so many groups and forums on the nichiest of niches, you don’t need to go anywhere except to your own computer to join them.

But this might be a problem if it means you don’t go anywhere else. Meetup.com is a service that allows you to start your own club (or “meetup”) focusing on a particular niche (or group of people) and it helps you find people online but the end result is to actually MEET UP in real life. Read the rest of this entry »

I just clicked on one - and it was a Coke ad of all things. I don’t usually drink Coke.

But this one had a blank Coke bottle (you know the shape of the bottle is actually trademarked) with an invitation to design my own coke bottle - so I clicked on it. (The Design a Coke site allows you to make your own design, mash up other people’s designs and share your creations with the world.)

The ad had mystery and an invitation for me to do something that looked like fun. It stood out from all the other boring banner ads.

When you click on an ad, have a think to yourself - why did I click on that ad? What was it about it that intrigued me? Answer that question and see how you can apply it to your own advertsing as well as the content you create (remember your blog posts also advertise for people to read them).

So when was the last time you clicked on an ad and what made you do it? Did it teach you anything?

Offline advertising and marketing- print, TV, radio and direct mail - have lost a lot of their shine as more people turn online. But don’t just write it off just yet. After all, even the masters of online advertising Google do Print Ads as I mentioned yesterday.

It really depends on who your target market is. Realise that there are still significant parts of demographics who don’t spend any or hardly any time on the internet at all. Kids and Generation Y may be on all the trendiest social networking apps, but they may not be your market and may not want or afford your product/service.

Print in particular can have a lot of value. People can tear out a coupon or an ad with an address on it. It’s a physical item that is likely to cross their paths again - it can serve as a constant reminder. Whereas even bookmarked pages on the internet are easily lost amongst the hundreds of other bookmarks that an average person can quickly accumulate. Paper can be stuck on a refrigerator, links cannot (at least not yet - the internet enabled fridge is a number of years off becoming a common household appliance).

There’s something too about the tactibility of paper that can lead to greater engagement and attention. Think about hard copy magazines and trade journals and think about e-zines and e-newsletters: do you treat them differently? Would your target market?

It may be as marketers focus their attention online, there will be less competition for attention in the offline space. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed less unsolicited mail coming in my real life mailbox - but way more spam (fortunately my Gmail spam filter is very good so I hardly if ever see any of it). And when I do get something in my mailbox, it’s a bit of a novelty so I’ll open it.

There’s a term in direct marketing called “lumpy mail” - it’s the strategy of putting something in the envelope other than a letter, something that creates a lump. That lump in turn turns the unsolicited piece of mail into a mystery and opening rates soar as most people can’t resist the temptation to find out what that lump is. If the lump is something of value or use the person, then you also tap into the psychological phenomenon of reciprocity - people tend to want to reciprocate when others do nice things for them (and often they’ll reciprocate above the value of the original benefit - one theory is to cancel out the uncomfortableness of being in “debt” to someone else). I think it requires more skills to create an equivalent online (Video and audio, I think are the online equivalents of lumpy mail - they are something different, they use different senses and provoke interaction on multiple levels.)

The online world will only get more and more important but don’t forget the offline world. You may find some offline campaigns more effective. Just remember to know your target market!

It’s not something you hear much about, but did you know Google can help you do offline advertising?

It’s part of Adwords and called Google Print Ads:

Google Print Ads is a new AdWords feature that enables advertisers to place targeted ads in newspapers throughout the United States. Newspaper advertising can reinforce your online ad campaigns by strengthening your message and expanding your audience.

Print Ads can make it easier to advertise in newspapers: create an ad in minutes, select from over 750 newspapers across the U.S., and set a price that’s right for you.

We’ll help you find newspapers and placements that work for your advertising needs and then coordinate the submission of your offers and ads to the newspapers. The easy-to-use AdWords interface helps advertisers find local and national newspapers; choose dates, sections, and ad sizes; upload and submit ads; and safely pay online. Overall, the ads are just like traditional newspaper ads, but much easier and more efficient to buy.

It works in a pretty similar way to Adwords, you bid on how much you’re prepared to pay for a particular ad. In this case, you use a slider to choose a bid somewhere in between Google’s minimum bid and the Publisher’s set price. As a guide, Google tells you the average price for the type of publication you’re looking at.

There’s even a blog that covers “the latest news from Google’s TV, Print and Audio Ad teams” - it’s called Taking it Offline.