I figured this past week’s analytics wouldn’t tell me much. I thought they’d be the same as the week before because I haven’t made any changes to my website yet.

Wrong!

And this taught me a valuable lesson. Actually, retaught me.

Three website related but offline occurrences were different between the two weeks. This week I had much less traffic than the previous week. That’s because I published a newsletter the previous week which drove traffic. But, the time spent per visitor and the number of page views increased dramatically this week over last. That’s because two closely related, but different, things happened this week.

I received two project inquiries this week. The first one from a major industrial company in NJ that I had included in an email campaign LAST JANUARY. The VP of MarComm knew they’d be reworking their website this year, knew he’d be short-handed, and saved that email. This week he visited my website, and spent a significant amount of time reviewing it. Then he called me to discuss the project. I’ll start working on it after Labor Day.

The second inquiry came from a local interactive agency. Like almost every local agency, their clients are B2C - retail, tourism, healthcare, etc. Because they know me, and they know I specialize in B2B, they spent time on the site to review my work before they called me. They have a new B2B client and they want me to help them with the account. I’ll start working on that on August 11.

So what’s the lesson I relearned? That offline activities affect who visits the website and why.

Repositioning of Bolen (and therefore the website) is important as my target market evolves. And reworking my content, SEO and SEM should result in more online leads. But offline marketing and networking activities designed to build business must still be maintained.

How about you? It’d be interesting to learn how other companies integrate offline with their online marketing.

Tags: business, content