Daren shot this e-marketer article over to me the other day --- the basic point of the article is that people are doing a lot of consumer research online, while still making the purchases in the store.  In more concrete words (from the article):  "Looked at another way, for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales."

Wow...that's pretty amazing --- so wait, you are telling me that my online presence pays off beyond online sales?  Of course it does!  What does this mean to you?  Well --- first, if you are not an e-commerce company (i.e. - services industry, B2B) it tells you that having an online presence and being able to be FOUND through search is still vital to your business. 

And if you are an e-commerce site that also has brick & mortar stores then it means that it isn't just your fancy shopping cart software that matters...you also need a presence for those online researchers that are comparing products/features and then going into a store to buy.  How can you make sure they come to YOUR store?  Well --- be there!  Could you imagine closing a retail store on December 22nd when demand is at an enormous high?  That is basically what you are doing in the online world when someone is searching (reflecting high demand..telling you they are interested in "organic cotton sheets") and one of your offerings is organic cotton sheets and you don't show up at the top of the search results.

So what do I think you should do?  BLOG of course!  Blog first for SEO, blog about your product and at the end of the day blog for the sake of your business.

We just hosted a webinar here at Compendium all about tracking and measuring the success of blogs, which is definitely a worthwhile topic; but the huge challenge of online marketing has always been how do you really measure what starts online and ends offline?  Of course, there is the option of in-store surveys, etc.; but the accuracy of this type of measure is also hard to obtain.   The e-marketer survey  does prove online research leads to offline buisness and at a high rate...make sure you SHOW UP the next time your potential client is researching your product offering!