How to measure your offline marketing campaigns
Offline marketing channels such as print, direct mail, billboards, vehicle wraps and trade shows are all extremely effective advertising mediums – particularly when it comes to marketing your business within your local catchment area.
These offline channels appeal to people of all ages, help boost brand visibility and when used tactically, can be an extremely cost-effective way for your business to reach your target audience.
But how can you tell if your offline campaigns are working?
In this post, we’re going to suggest a few ideas to help track and measure your offline marketing methods to ensure a successful outcome.
Types of Offline Marketing Campaigns
Before jumping into the types of tracking techniques, let’s touch on a few popular offline marketing campaign methods.
One of the most powerful assets you often have is your local area market, and the immediate catchment area of prospects is often not fully maximised.
Here are four offline marketing tactics that don’t require a big marketing budget but can be incredibly successful ways to engage with your local customers and drive increased business opportunities.
Noticeboards
Think outside the box and target your desired audience where they buy, with strategically placed advertising.
Tapping into your local community encourages word-of-mouth business referrals and can make your business a talking point in a social meeting place.
At Notice Board Systems, our marketing medium is unique and powerful as it delivers businesses messages to a captive, targeted audience who see this message in an environment conducive to spending – the supermarket.
With shoppers spending on average 11.5 hours per month and a reach of 6,500,000 viewers per week in the supermarket, the return on investment can be huge.
Direct Mail
Direct mail is one of the oldest offline marketing techniques, and although it may seem out of date, it is a highly effective way to reach current and prospective customers. Bonus? It doesn’t come with a spam folder, so it goes straight in your consumer’s mailbox.
In fact, according to Australia Post, when it comes to open and read rates, research indicates that over 99% of people open their mail, 60% read it thoroughly, 39% scan it for interest, and 54% store it for later reference!
Bus stops and train stations
Millions of Australians ride their local bus and train lines every day, In fact, in Melbourne alone 3 million people use public transport in a month. Ads in these transportation stations are a great way to target daily commuters.
Attending Conferences and Trade Shows
Trade shows can provide numerous opportunities to network with both potential buyers and other industry leaders. These events can offer mass offline marketing opportunities; for instance, they are ideal places to distribute print materials, promotional merchandise and featured speaking.
Three Ways to Track your Offline Marketing Campaigns
Here are a few easy ways you can track the effectiveness of your offline marketing efforts:
Unique Discount Codes
Custom discount codes are a great solution to tracking offline marketing methods online, such as ‘use promo code IGA15’ for an additional 15% off your order”. By including a unique promotional code in your offline advertisement, you can measure precisely how many people have used that code and saw that particular piece of offline material.
If you’re familiar with custom variables in Google Analytics, you can follow this guide to set up Google Analytics to track your promotional codes.
Here are some of our top tips when using discount promotional codes in your offline marketing:
Create memorable discount codes.
This will mean that people who find them in your offline marketing campaigns will find it easier to use them (and remember!)
Keep track of ALL your custom codes.
You can do this by logging them in a Google spreadsheet to avoid repeating them elsewhere and ensuring you can measure the success of each campaign.
Keep in mind that discount codes can be listed on other sites.
The cons of using custom discount codes are that people can submit them to coupon sites and share with other people. This can potentially skew your results, as you’re not just tracking visitors or buyers from your offline methods.
See below how Hello Fresh used custom discount codes when handing out vouchers via direct mail.
Custom Landing Pages
Have you considered creating a stand-alone webpage that you can direct customers to? This is often called a ‘Landing Page’ that is used solely for the purpose of providing information for a marketing or advertising campaign.
By creating a landing page, you can use free tools like Google Analytics to count exact page views to find where your viewers have come from and effectively measure success.
This page is usually not accessible from your main website – it’s where the visitor “lands” after seeing your advert which tells them to visit this page for more information. Therefore the only visitors to the landing page will be from those people who have seen the advert – providing you with an exact measurement of how many enquiries or visits that advert drove to your campaign.
For example, if you were to advertise on our Supermarket Noticeboards, the advert could include a unique URL telling potential customers to visit that link for more details or to get in touch or take up your offer. You can then know exactly how many enquiries were being created specifically from the noticeboard advert.
See below how Uber used a custom URL/landing page:
If a viewer was to visit this landing page URL that Uber references on the billboard as Uber.com/DriveNow, then you could attribute all of the page visits to this Billboard as there were no other means of finding this web page.
In digital marketing, a landing page is a single web page that is used solely for the purpose of providing information for a marketing or advertising campaign.
If I were to visit the landing page that Uber references on the billboard Uber.com/DriveNow then I can attribute all of the page visits to this Billboard as there were no other means of finding this web page.
Unique Phone Numbers
Businesses can also track offline marketing efforts and determine ROI by using multiple unique phone numbers and implementing call tracking. With call tracking, you’ll be able to see which marketing campaigns are generating the most phone calls and determine which method brings in the most sales.
For example, let’s say you run marketing for a bricks and mortar store. You might be running multiple campaigns at once: Online ads, Radio ads, Prints ads, or you may have an ad on one of our Community Noticeboards.
By using unique phone numbers for separate campaigns, you can determine what is actually working instead of making assumptions. You can also correctly attribute the best marketing methods for your business, prove ROI, save money, recover leads and make better marketing decisions in the future.
Call tracking can be done at a fundamental level so you can get an overview of where your calls are coming from, or alternatively, you can set up advanced call tracking so you can see results at an advanced level. Google Analytics and PPC platforms allow you to do call track for free. Or you can splurge on effective software solutions.
Conclusion
At Notice Board Systems, we feature your business, service or product within a highly trusted brand of a supermarket, all day, every day.
Our noticeboards are inherently more trackable as we have built-in business card and flyer holders offering the perfect opportunity to gauge interest in your services by including memorable discount codes, custom landing page URLs and unique phone numbers that can help measure where your successful enquiries are coming from.
Do you want to implement a successful and measurable offline marketing campaign in your business’s marketing efforts? Take advantage of one of Australia’s most powerful local area marketing opportunities with your choice of over 700 great local sites with exposure of up to 5 million viewers every week, contact us on 1300 390 242 or email sales@nbsteam.com.au