Do you advertise offline as well?

With the new local community I'm planning, I've realized I'm probably going to have to do some offline advertising in the community. If you've done so, has it turned out to be as effective as online geotargeted advertising? Do people bother to go type in your URL after seeing it offline, or are they more likely to visit if they can just click to get there?

 

I have done letterbox drops, which were useless from 500 i got no sign ups. I have done signs up, never had a sign up. I have put postcards at a shop relevant to my niche, and heaps of signups. It's all i'd bother doing again.

 

Indeed, I have created a few offline promotional campaigns for online communities.

I'm currently in the process of founding and building a local car fanatics organization. I have done this in the past and, seeing as it was a complete success (and due to the fact that I'm a self-proclaimed car fanatic), I'm going to be doing it again - this time, catering to surrounding towns, as well. As this is going to be an actual "club" (monthly gatherings, various events, etc), I plan on promoting the online aspect of this to the max.

When I started the original club, members were all over the online discussion community aspect.

 

Not yet but we will be in the future

 

My forum held a poster contest to spread the word offline. If you participated, you had to create a poster (8.5 in. x 11 in.) advertising the website. Members were free to design it how they wished, but of course only the best-looking one would win. The winner's poster was put up for download and was hopefully put up in places around the world (nice thinking, eh?).

If I can find the winning poster I'll post it here so everyone can get an idea of what we were looking for with the contest.

 

It's in the works.

The plan is to do some sponsoring out at the local gun club and gun shows. I'm also going to create some clothing as well as vehicle stickers with a new site logo. I figured since I travel a lot, why not

 

I haven't. It doesn't seem like it would be effective for my forums.

 

Haven't had a forum that needed it. I do have plans for one down-the-line (probably early next year) that would benefit from offline advertising in the region.

 

No, not at all; well nothing paid anyways. We do a bit of guerrilla marketing and that's about it for offline. I'm not really sure it would be worth it to market a general discussion forum offline.

 

What sort of guerrilla marketing do you do, tryfuhl? That's a subject I'm interested in.

 

social media

physical media (to a much lower extent, but probably as far reaching if not more)

we've done things like printed out stickers with a url on them.. without giving away the url it's basically something like "whatsthissticker.com" (once again, not that particular domain name, but similar) and things like that

we've held contests for public display of our site and whatnot as well

 

Made tons of posters and hung them every where got one or two sign ups but thats about it

 

I have made a few posters before and posted them at local places that you would find many sport fans. I'm not sure how well it works but word of the mouth is still the best and cheapest way in my opinion.