How to Measure the Success of Offline Marketing Online

As a start-up business, the ability to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is crucial.

By understanding which marketing channels are providing a return on your investment, you can focus your efforts on those, rather than wasting valuable resources on campaigns that aren’t producing the desired results.

Monitoring the impact of online marketing is relatively straightforward with simple analytics tools that provide valuable insights, but it is also possible to measure your offline marketing using digital technology.

Online and offline marketing is becoming intertwined, and one often has an influence on the other.

For example a particular TV ad or magazine advert can spark a conversation on a social media network which will engage your audience and drive visitors to your website.

Landing pages. Whether you’re distributing leaflets, advertising in a magazine, or displaying a billboard, most adverts now include a URL that potential customers can visit to find out more information.

Rather than using the same URL on all forms of advertising include a unique one on each advert so that you can determine how your visitor found you by the URL that they type in.

This has the added advantage that they can be directed to a landing page that is tailored to the advert they have seen. Of course some visitors will search for your company name rather than typing in the URL, but this method should still show you which adverts are your highest performers.

Discount codes. Everyone loves a bargain, so special offers or discount codes are a great way to track offline marketing.

Include a unique discount code on each type of advertising, and if possible link the code to the name of the publication, TV channel, radio station, or location of your advert.

By analysing the discount codes that have been redeemed you will see which marketing channels have been the most effective.

Traffic comparison. Using online analytics you can monitor the traffic to your website before and after launching a particular advert to determine how many visitors to allocate to that campaign.

The amount of time you monitor will depend on the type of advert. The impact of TV ads is immediate so you can compare visitor traffic ten minutes before the ad and ten minutes afterwards, as people access your site on a second screen such as a laptop or tablet.

For newspaper ads compare traffic 24 hours before and after publication. You can also compare conversions such as sales, sign-ups, and contacts to determine the quality of the traffic generated.

Hashtags. Once the domain of Twitter, hashtags are now used by Facebook and look to be spreading across social media channels.

Including a hashtag in your offline advert, whether it’s a printed ad or a broadcast ad, can generate social media conversations which are relatively simple to monitor.

Make sure you have unique hashtags for each advert so you can gauge the response to different forms of marketing.

Site surveys. Asking your website visitors where they found out about your business may seem like an old fashioned idea, but it can still help you to discover which of your marketing channels are worth investing in.

You could use a site intercept survey, or you could add a question to your registration form, contact form, or checkout.

Make it a multiple choice question including all your marketing channels both online and offline, and keep it optional to avoid irritating customers.

Only a sample of your visitors will answer your question but it will still help you to see where they first heard about you.

The distinction between online and offline marketing is blurring, and it is clear that one impacts the other, meaning that they can often be measured side by side.

An offline campaign is often the driver for increased activity online which is simple to track and quantify. By measuring your offline marketing performance online you can determine which of your marketing campaigns are driving the most conversions and are therefore worth maintaining and expanding.

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