More and more SMEs and small businesses want to make the leap into the digital world. Most of them already have a website and social media profiles, but after the commercial standstill caused by COVID-19 they want to reinvent themselves and invest in digital campaigns to boost their businesses locally.
As a marketing expert at Agencia SIM, my job is to propose the most effective, lowest-cost strategy for them to reach their goals. Our local clients are usually no longer just looking to increase sales through their traditional online channels, but also to bring more people into their premises, especially when what they offer are products or services that need a closer or face-to-face approach to close the sale or sign up for the service.
What is research online-purchase offline, or the ROPO strategy?
At Agencia SIM we are finding the ROPO strategy very effective. “Research online-purchase offline” is a strategy that uses digital actions to attract customers who complete the conversion directly in the physical shop.
For us it is a perfect methodology for any business whose goal is for the customer to go to the physical shop to make the purchase or acquire the product or service.
How do you apply the strategy by type of product?
We could distinguish two ways of applying the strategy: when a product is purchased or when it is applied to intangible products or services.
When it comes to purchasing a product, the customer goes to the physical shop to buy it once they have done their research, compared the products they are interested in through online searches and decided to buy it by visiting the point of sale, having been reached through digital actions such as Facebook campaigns or social media, SEM, media advertising or email marketing.
For services or intangible products, we are well aware nowadays of how much competition there is in every sector. So, to make sure this strategy works well for intangible products or services, after reaching the customer through the various digital actions we are in favour of rewarding them with a “prize”, gift or discount for visiting our clients’ premises.
This way, although the cost of the campaign goes up, we can guarantee a higher ROI.
How can we apply the research online-purchase offline strategy?
In a ROPO strategy at local level, the first thing we do at the agency is prepare a briefing with our client to find out who their target audience is, what budget they have and what goals they want to achieve.
This would be the starting point for developing any strategy at Agencia SIM. From there we start working on our client’s target area, identifying the most effective market niches for reaching their target audience.
As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, this strategy consists of attracting customers online who then convert offline (in person). So the first part of the strategy we propose is to identify the online channels where we can attract these customers and the most effective way of reaching them locally through digital actions such as Google or social media ads, with very precise targeting of the location we want to reach.
Complementary actions
We believe these actions work very well alongside programmatic advertising, using Big Data to identify the segment of the target audience we want to attract, always focused on the local area we are targeting and on people who have already shown prior interest in their searches for the product or service the business offers.
Buying ad space programmatically and with targeting on the websites that the users in our selected target audience visit.
This way we can keep reaching them in their everyday online activity with new ads from businesses that offer what they need and, as a hook, as we suggest for intangible products or services, they will receive a reward in the form of a gift or discount.
Conclusions
This is one of the proposals we offer at Agencia SIM to clients who want to carry out online actions to win offline customers for their physical premises at local level. The results we have achieved with this tailored ROPO strategy have been very beneficial for our clients, covering the investment made.
Even so, every case is different and each client sets specific goals that we focus on. That is why at the agency we adapt the different digital marketing and traditional communication strategies to achieve them.
Mi experiencia profesional, se he enfocado en Marketing y en el Comercio Internacional. Actualmente, trabajo como especialista SEO y SEM en Agencia SIM. Visitar su web
