Michelle O'Hara - Director / Founder, OH! Marketing
Article as per on website on the Founders
Magazine website
At a time when everything in business seems to be about automation, digital campaigns, and AI-powered everything, there’s a quiet resurgence
underway in marketing, and it doesn’t start in the inbox or on a screen. It starts in a room, face-to-face, with a handshake.
Across Australia and beyond, more mid-sized businesses are reassessing their marketing mix and rediscovering the value of showing up in person, not just online.
Michelle O’Hara, Director and Founder of OH! Marketing, recently spoke with Giselle Parks from Founders Magazine about building meaningful connections in business.
The logic behind the move offline is rooted in results. While digital tactics have become indispensable for visibility and scale, they’re increasingly less effective at generating trust. Email campaigns are deleted, ads are ignored, algorithms change, and amid the noise, many businesses find themselves shouting into a void.
Offline marketing, by contrast, creates space for intentionality. A well-orchestrated trade show presence, a targeted B2B event, and a strategic partnership with a relevant industry association are catalysts for conversation. For companies tired of chasing digital engagement metrics with little payoff, they offer something far more valuable: connection.
“Marketing today isn’t just about visibility, it’s about credibility,” says Michelle O’Hara, Strategist and Director of OH! Marketing and a seasoned business leader with more than 18 years’ experience. “And credibility is built faster when you’re in the room.”
A Strategic Shift, Not a Nostalgic One
The return to in-person strategies isn’t about rejecting digital tools. It’s about rebalancing. Smart businesses are integrating offline elements into their growth strategies, not as a fallback, but as a forward-thinking approach to differentiation.
The logic is simple: relationships close deals, and relationships are built faster when two people sit across from each other, exchange real dialogue, and understand context, not just content. O’Hara’s team has identified three core areas where offline marketing is driving tangible outcomes:
In December last year, O’Hara launched Connection Central, an exclusive, invite-only series of curated lunches segmented by industry, designed specifically to spark meaningful business connections in an increasingly crowded and copycat market.
“We anticipated a slowdown in Brisbane’s market and rather than wait, we responded early with a proactive, high-impact format that brought the right people together at exactly the right time,” says O’Hara.
The format has been so successful, it’s now being imitated, but without the strategic depth, relationships, or foresight that underpinned its creation. “Let’s be clear,” O’Hara continues. “Connection Central isn’t a networking event, it’s a relationship accelerator. And while others are trying to copy the mechanics, they can’t replicate the trust, timing, or access that we’ve built.”
OH! Marketing was founded in response to a fundamental truth in business: marketing has become too complex and too fragmented for most companies to manage effectively on their own. What was once a single department is now a hybrid of analytics, storytelling, systems, and strategy, and it touches every part of the business.
The firm’s approach reflects this reality. Rather than treating marketing as an isolated function, OH! Marketing embeds itself as part of the broader management team, aligning branding, marketing, and sales with overall business objectives. The result is a unified growth strategy that can shift between online and offline seamlessly, depending on what the business needs.
“Our clients aren’t asking for more marketing,” O’Hara explains. “They’re asking for better alignment. They want marketing that fits their stage of growth, their sales process, and their team capacity, and they want to stop guessing.”
In many ways, what’s old is new again. Tradeshows, business breakfasts, thought leadership panels, and even printed collateral that were once viewed as relics are now seen as vehicles for stand-out moments. When orchestrated strategically, they do something digital rarely can: they make a business feel real.
O’Hara is quick to point out that offline tactics aren’t universally right for every company, nor are they easy. They require time, planning, and a clear understanding of the audience and the market. But for those willing to invest, the ROI goes beyond lead generation; it touches culture, brand authority, and market positioning. “Being in the room still matters,” she says. “Especially when that room is filled with the right people.”
The pendulum doesn’t have to swing all the way back to analogue, but forward-thinking businesses are beginning to question the over-reliance on digital for all their growth needs. Instead of asking “How many impressions did we get?” they’re asking “Did we create a real connection?” And increasingly, they’re finding that the answer lies not in pixels, but in people.
As more businesses reorient their strategies around real-world interactions, the role of marketing will continue to evolve toward nuance rather than just novelty. It turns out that the simplest tool in the box, a handshake, might still be the most powerful.
To learn more about this effective marketing approach, visit ohmarketing.com.au or connect with Michelle O’Hara on LinkedIn.
