Having an active online presence can help drive traffic to your website, but how do you get it to drive actual feet to your door? Business owners should look at integrating their offline activities with their online social media activities, to create buzz before an event, help non-profits attract volunteers, or to direct customers to storefront businesses that rely on foot traffic to make most of their money. It’s not as hard as it sounds, as people are using the Internet like a directory or online phone book these days. You can even just piggy back ride on someone else’s event and save the cost of getting merchant funding to host the event. The key is to start with a particular strategy in mind, and develop useful techniques that will make people want to look up your business and visit you in person, when they’re in town.

Create Online Events To Advertise Offline Events

Are you holding a special event at your place of business, like a wine tasting, or an educational series of speakers? There’s no reason you can’t advertise this online on Facebook and Twitter, long before the event actually takes place. The nice thing about setting up a registration area online in Facebook, is that you can get a good idea of the number of people who might be attending your event, especially if you offer a link to an area where they can get a discount  for registering early. People will be more likely to register ahead of time, if they know they’re getting a discount and/or a freebie, rather than wait until the last minute.

Create An Event Sales Page

You’re selling the event, rather than a produce or service, but it should have it’s own designated sales page, just as if it were a product. This way, you can link to it in all your social networking sites, and people can view promotional details related to the event in areas where a full description may be limited, like Twitter. Include SEO keywords and make sure event place is listed, so that the search engines catch it when people search for it in your local area.

Even if you’re a non-profit, the event should be listed on it’s own separate page, as well as included within newsletters and email campaigns. Events are the perfect time to generate interest in new memberships, but if the only people who are notified are already on your emailing list, what’s the probability of that occurring. Having a separate page that you can publicize outside your membership will help you to get more people interested and showing up.

Start The Ball Rolling

The more people that attend, the more likely others will attend. It’s always good to publicize the number of people registered, especially if you already know many who are already coming. On Facebook, it will give a count of how many people are attending and how many may be attending. Try to get your friends to register there, and share the link with the friends on their lists too.

To Get Customers In Your Doors

Offer special limited time coupons for people wanting to visit your restaurant, or other offline business. Let them print it off your website, and bring it in to get credit. You can do that for any number of promotional items you want to give away too, to bring customers to your door. If you’re an office supply store for instance, you might want to give away some free office supplies for purchases over $50 or more. It’s up to you and your ingenuity to figure out what offer you can make online that will lead people to investigate you more.

Advertise On Third Party Sites

If you’re offering vacation rentals, you want to look at other regional areas to advertise, not just locally. Partner with other tourist or travel sites to give package deals that will entice their customers to visit you too. Where are your customers most likely to congregate online? That’s where you should advertise your events and specials, even if they’re not local. Partner with other big companies or non-profits that you don’t directly compete against to provide something for free at their events, and put your URL on it. If you want to get even wider attention, sponsor a local charitable event and then publicize your online presence there. This way, you don’t have to organize the event or even keep track of publicizing it. The third party non-profit does it all, and you just are there to show your support and gain some publicity for your own local offerings.