Offline vs online marketing, a trade-off or balance game: A founder's perspective

In today's rapidly evolving marketing landscape, brands are continuously seeking innovative methods to captivate their target audience and forge enduring connections. According to a survey conducted among marketing professionals in 2022, about 51% of Indian marketers planned to spend roughly 10% of their budgets on online marketing technology.

As businesses strive to keep up with the pace of change, they are faced with a pivotal marketing dilemma: between offline and online marketing, should they treat one as a trade-off of the other or concentrate on striking the perfect balance?

Having led Clovia for the last 8 years, we have been posed with similar challenges and opportunities that lay within this marketing conundrum. Here are some of my thoughts on navigating the intricacies of blending offline and online channels to devise a successful and sustainable marketing strategy that aligns with the ever-changing demands of today's fast-paced, low attention span environment.

Leverage E-commerce platforms in your marketing strategy

As the e-commerce industry continues to expand rapidly, brands are presented with unparalleled opportunities to harness the power of online marketing. Today e-commerce channels are to brand’s presence in the online ecosystem, just the large formats were/are in offline. Being present there gets you the eyeballs and if your product is performing, it gets you profitable visibility too. So partnering with well-established platforms is a no-brainer. Recent reports reveal that fashion accounts for nearly 25% of the entire e-commerce industry, making it the second-largest category. This underlines the importance for fashion brands to effectively leverage e-commerce platforms.

These platforms provide brands with an expanded reach, granting them access to customers who may not have discovered the brand through traditional marketing channels. Moreover, e-commerce platforms offer the advantage of an established customer base, better supply chain scale and enhanced reverse logistics allowing brands to focus more on their competency of innovating on products and brand building. More-so it gets a brand what it lacks and needs most in early days of evolution, that is critical mass of customers to push demand & supply alike. However, the thought should always be to make money. Selling at a loss on these platforms, thinking it’s for marketing, is a bad precedent for any brand.

Amplifying brand recall through online channels

We are living in unprecedented times when getting your voice heard as a brand is extremely fast and extremely tough at the same time. Fast - thanks to the power of digital media and tough - thanks to the democracy of digital media, which allows everyone to have the same opportunity to speak out. The power of democracy is in equal opportunity. If you leverage the digital media correctly, your brand can stand out and can have a far bigger impact for a controlled dollar spend. However it's critical to use the power of content to make sure your brand gets the bang for the buck while communicating your brand message to the restless digital customer.

At Clovia, our business involves a lot of educating - about your body size/shape/fit, about hygiene, about products suiting to life stages. But we realized early on that education is boring. And our brand was all about using happiness as our superpower. That brought out our content strategy of keeping it fun (and sometimes funny) and cool and yet bringing the message home. The education continues but never ever gets boring. As a result, over 30% of Clovia's website traffic is driven by our content across various platforms.

Synergy in online and offline marketing experiences

In this digital age, blending online and offline marketing initiatives is crucial, almost inevitable for anyone in the business of building a brand. Most critical and challenging bit in this blend is to ensure the discipline of keeping your messaging consistent across channels. This is because the more channels you touch, the more content you build, the stronger your discipline has to be. You cannot have a funny side for digital and functional side for the offline. You need to have a constant brand aura, with of course tweaks in messaging basis the audience you are catering.

Striking the perfect balance between offline and online marketing

The traditional way of offline marketing will never get old and will continue to be a critical medium for communicating your brand message and building meaningful relationships with your customers - across tiers.

Digital brings the additional opportunity to personalize, gather feedback, test smaller audiences and refine your messaging. You have the potential for scalability and a data-driven approach to target specific audiences and optimize promotional efforts for maximum impact.

By integrating these two powerful approaches, businesses can create comprehensive marketing strategies that capitalize on the unique advantages of each.

In the era of 10 minutes delivery mastering the balance between online and offline is not an option anymore but a way to survive and thrive. The key is in the fusion of both marketing methods by picking the best of both worlds and building a brand that can stand the test of time, and consistently meet and exceed customer expectations.

Pankaj highlights the importance of marrying offline and online marketing in order to deliver a balanced omnichannel brand experience across platforms and in-store for their customers. Take the Demo today and learn how WebEngage can help you build engaging omnichannel strategies to deliver phygital customer experiences.

About the Author: Pankaj Vermani

Pankaj Vermani is the Founder and CEO of Clovia. He previously worked at Vriti Infocom as a Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. He is keen on all things related retail, technology and consumer-tech. Pankaj is an archetypal software engineer and pursued his MTech from Indian Institur of Technology, Delhi. He is a serial entrepreneur having started several ventures prior to founding Clovia in 2015, with his wife, Suman Chowdhury, a lingerie designer. Apart from being an entrepreneur, Pankaj is also passionate about theatre and has been a part of the Delhi Theatre Circle for 25 years.

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