Effective Offline Marketing With Drop Cards
// March 31st, 2009 // No Comments » // Affiliate Marketing
Are you just starting out in affiliate marketing and PPC advertising? Are you a veteran PPC player that is looking for other ways to maximize profits with little marketing spend? Have your PPC campaigns recently drained your pocket book with little ROI? It happens to the best of us. Sometimes a PPC space is hyper-competitive and your advertising costs can skyrocket due to a number of factors including: keyword competition, veteran marketers, poor ad copy, non converting landing pages, weak urls, the dreaded quality score (Google), and a host of many other factors depending upon the search engine you are using for your marketing efforts.
Have you ever seen a drop card or a promo post card flyer? Of course you have! In the world of guerrila marketing, street teams are hired to go out and use drop cards to market businesses, music artists, club events, sporting events, etc. This type of marketing costs pennies in comparison to some PPC campaigns.
Still not sure what a drop card is? No problem, I’ll explain. A drop card is nothing more than a simple business card or post card that has effective ad copy, eye catching graphics/color schemes, and a URL. These drop cards are strategically “dropped” in public places with high traffic, such as: gas stations, shopping malls, strip centers, restaurants, cafes, clubs, bars, college campuses, car washes, bookstores, movie theaters, etc. in order to maximize visibility and exposure to potential customers. Beginning to see the idea? You basically blanket your local area with your advertisements for very little spend. I will show you where you can pick up your own drop cards to test this offline marketing method.
500 Template Cards
very few design options
$9.00 range
500 Premier Business Cards
upload your own design
design online with more templates
custom text
$16.00 range
NOW ON SALE – Best Value $9.00 range
1000 Dollar Drop Cards
drop cards that look like REAL MONEY!
extreme eye catching!
custom text and logo
$145.00 no doubt about it these are expensive but just look at them!
EXAMPLE:
Running some CPA offers for ringtones? Are you finding that some PPC keywords are way too expensive? Perhaps you should try drop card marketing. Here is a real example of how an affiliate marketer might employ this offline marketing tactic. Let’s say that you own the url, RingToneKing.com and you use this url for your online marketing efforts (not sure who owns this, but hey, you just got some free exposure – you’re welcome) and you are finding that your PPC efforts are not doing as well as you would like. So, you begin a drop card marketing campaign in your local area to generate some traffic and hopefully, some conversions. I have written a fast action guide for you to model in your marketing niche. Let’s get started!
1. Purchase A Separte, Unique Domain
In this example, let’s say you decide to buy RingToneOffers.com, which is different from your primary domain, RingToneKing.com, that you market online (SEO, social media, PPC, etc.) You want this separate domain name so that you can effectively track your offline efforts. When we say “offline”, we simply mean that our marketing is done offline but our conversions happen online, since we are driving people to our domain via our drop cards. This new domain should have some form of analytics running: google analytics, awstats, or something similar, so that you can see that people are coming to your site from your offline marketing efforts. You will only want to use this new domain for your offline marketing efforts. Head on over to GoDaddy.com to pick up your “drop card domain”
2. Carefully Select Your Placements
Since you are marketing ringtones, you know that your target audience is somewhere within the demographic of male and females between the ages of 15 to 30. You have decided that your best areas to advertise with your drop cards would be near local highschools and colleges/community colleges. Scout out local movie theatres, movie rental businesses, theme parks (if applicable), sporting events, shopping malls, fast food restaurants, starbucks, cafe’s, ice cream parlors, etc. that are in close proximity to these areas. You might also consider areas where young adults hang out such as: clubs, bars, etc. and use your drop cards accordingly. Young people buy ringtones, so you need to advertise to those areas. This isn’t rocket science! Think of this type of offline marketing as online marketing within the Google content network or on sites like adbrite. How is that the same? Well, you get to select your placements within these content networks, right? So, do the same in regards to your offline efforts. Select your placements wisely and they will convert, but just like online marketing, you MUST have great ad copy, the best design that fits both your budget and your product, and a unique URL.
3. Budget, Ad Copy & Design
As you already know, the success of your online PPC marketing is contingent upon your budget, focused keywords, great ad copy, good urls, and awesome landing pages. This also applies to your offline marketing efforts. You must decide what your budget is for offline marketing, as this will determine what options you can include on your drop cards. The larger your budget, the more design options are available to you. You must also focus on creating good ad copy, so that your potential customer completes the first call to action, which is picking up the card and taking it with them. The design factor of your card: color, fonts, and background must also be taken into consideration, as this plays a key role in the potential customers completing both the first call to action and the second call to action. This second call to action includes retrieving the card to get the url to visit the website. (On a side note: this is why selecting a great domain name for offline marketing is so important. Someone may pick up your card and read it, but not take it with them. However, if you have a solid domain name and your ad copy was good – it is possible that they will remember the domain name!!)
4. Start Dropping!
Now that you have an idea of what drop cards are, and how you use them, you must order your first run and start dropping these cards in high traffic public areas!! Good luck!
