The weakest link in today's marketing model is the smooth assimilation of online with offline into one cohesive process. A well designed web site and a carefully planned Ad campaign are both crippled if they aren't seamlessly combined with an online offer.

Here is what I mean, I looked at a local Newspaper last week. I found that when it comes to combining offline advertising with the web advertising, eighty seven percent of the ads in issue were either wasted or doing a poor job of communicating an Online presence for the advertiser's business.

Advertising is a business tool. Advertising communicates solutions and prompts action. When an advertisement pulls a consumer to the website, the opportunity to present a targeted offer is huge. Motivated visitors are buyers. That means that your offline offer and your Online offer must build on one another. Marketing will lure a potential client. The website must convert the visitor through value and focused actions.

Some people have argued that advertising is mostly a branding vehicle and it is not practicle to guage an ads true success by its immediate pull. Simply stated, that's not accurate. When looking at all the advertisements I reviewed for this article, one hundred and twelve contained direct calls to action; visit, call, learn, contact, and so forth. Seventeen did not. Half were clearly suggesting that a visit to the business was a logical next step. When a call to action is presented, the ad's success must be based on the action being taken. From this point, the branding concept becomes an excuse if the ad does not perform as expected.



So what is the next big question to ask? "What do we do if the ad actually pulls new visitors?" What happens if a visitor responds to the message and decides to take that highly desired act of folowing the URL? What should happen is that these visitors should be sent to a unique sales page, where they are presented with an offer that relates directly to the ad message they responded to. The offer should mention the referring publication and reflect an understanding of that visitors expectations. The offer should talk more specifically about the topic the ad presented (solution, benefit, social proof... whatever). The offer should itself contain further calls to action or a clear process to purchase a product or service.

Online marketing is not a fire and forget process. Visitors from advertising must not be dumped onto a general home page and left find the information for themselves. This occurs if no focused content is immediately visible or relates to the ad they responded to.

From the ads reviewed I found that; 1. Sixty-six percent of the ads in our sample issue use a home page as the URL linked to. These ads cost a fair amount of money to deliver a message, and drove the visitor to a general page that had no specific next step (either graphically or textually). 2. Nine percent have no URL at all. 3. Twelve percent have unique URLs, but were wasted since the visitor was drive to a hit counter to determine pull.

These are simple errors that are easy to fix. Businesses everywhere are in dire need of cost-effective marketing solutions. The opportunity to provide quality consulting services has never been greater!