Entrepreneurs and salespeople have started to spend more and more time online as we move into a more digital era that is increasingly focused on online marketing. Through chat rooms, phone calls, and social media pages, they communicate with their customers. Digital marketing has taken over as the dominant strategy. Cold calls and sales catalogs are quickly fading into history.

Why is in-person marketing important? How does it assist?

What, then, makes face-to-face sales and marketing such an important component of a company's strategy? Face-to-face marketing is important because it gives your employees the chance to contact clients personally, which is difficult to do in the world of digital marketing.

Increase social and emotional ties

As I indicated above, face-to-face sales and marketing are important because they allow your salespeople and customer care personnel to more readily forge social and emotional bonds with your clients than they do while conducting business online.

There is nothing better than knowing you are speaking with a real person who has a personality; in fact, some businesses, like Discover, have created entire advertising around the promise that you will speak to a person when you pick up the phone.

When you can physically interact with a customer, such as by speaking to them face-to-face or shaking their hand, your message will resonate with them just that much more strongly. This is not just a benefit to customers when you have people on the other end of the line or at the other side of the trade show booth.

Form connections and increase credibility

It all comes down to your reputation and relationships, not just with your clients but also with your suppliers, vendors, and rival companies.

Even if some of the top brands have succeeded in building relationships with their customers and connecting with their audiences online, it's far simpler to do so when you can physically meet them and shake their hands.

So how do you utilize face-to-face marketing to form bonds with your clients and others and establish credibility?

Simple: you teach one another. Show off how your products function and any potential topics or issues they might address. For instance, it makes sense to have a software developer or quality assurance expert on hand (or both) to speak with potential customers if your business sells computer software used for quality assurance.

Make your business more accessible and noticeable

To 'make yourself more visible and accessible,' what does it mean? You could believe that you are as visible and reachable as you possibly can be if you are doing face-to-face marketing, right? Wrong!

Let's get to it:

They have specific expectations of you when you provide them with a product. They anticipate the following from you:

• Be able to respond to their inquiries
• Be there for them when they need you.
• Above all, acknowledge when you can't assist them.
• If you are unable to meet this expectation for a customer, they will look elsewhere.

Improve your communication skills

Speaking with someone in person is considerably simpler than speaking with someone online, and it also results in far more successful communication. What am I saying?

One, there isn't a tone option in a text box. Depending on what you type, you can just irritate or frustrate a consumer. Straight text robs your words of any meaning.

For another, people perceive us as being far more authentic in person than they do online. Currently, technology cannot recreate that human factor. Why? In any case, we can infer just as much about a person as we can about them from their verbal and body language cues.

Inform your business about emerging trends and technologies.

One of the biggest reasons to engage in face-to-face marketing and sales in 2018 is that it allows you and your business the chance to learn about new trends and technology, especially if you attend trade exhibitions, which are primarily made to connect businesses with other firms.

Additionally, they frequently include certificates, seminars, workshops, and lectures intended to familiarize the professionals in attendance with new or standard technologies and trends.