How to track the success of your offline advertising campaigns
I absolutely love incorporating an element of digital in all of my marketing campaigns, but sometimes online just isn’t enough.
Sometimes you can’t escape using offline advertising in order to reach your audience.
Tracking online activity such as reach or engagement via a click to a website is easy, but more traditional forms of advertising such as radio and outdoor is a little more tricky.
Here are five ways to track your next advertising campaign:
QR Code
This isn’t the sexiest of options, but adding a QR code to your outdoor campaigns can help.
You can customise the look and feel of these with your brand’s colours and logo etc, but it’s pretty difficult to escape the black and white checkered look. They have also been over-done in recent years and depending on the location (and your audience), you may not get many people scanning it.
A unique URL
This is by far one of the most popular ways to track offline campaigns. You can use a URL shortener or use a custom domain for your campaign, which allows you to know exactly where they’ve come from.
My recommendation is that you use the Google URL builder, as this will allow you to uniquely identify every element of your advertising campaign. You could effectively detail the exact the location of each billboard or poster, so you know the best locations for future campaigns.
If you use the Google URL builder, these links will also appear in your Google Analytics dashboard, so you can track what other pages people go on to view after they land.
Custom landing page
Similar to a unique URL, you may set-up a landing page specifically for your campaign.
The advantage of this over using a page on your website is that there is no where else for people to go once they land on the page. I.e. visitors to the page won’t wonder off and look at something else. It can also cut out the noise of other traffic on your website, which will make going through the traffic data even easier.
Discount code
Again, this isn’t new or fancy but it is an effective way to track your campaigns.
Include a discount code to uniquely identify the method of advertising. For example, TV17 for a TV advert or RAIL17 for a rail display.
A search phrase
No matter how short your shortened URL or telephone number is, people may not have the time on their daily commute to jot down the address. They are also unlikely to have the time to open an app and scan your QR code.
Come up with a unique and memorable campaign phrase that’s only a few words long and make it stand out! Use the phrase on outdoor advertising and even ask people to search it in radio ad campaigns.
Just make sure that the phrase is unique enough that you can rank for it in search engine results!
Hashtag
Hashtags are a popular way to collate conversations around a particular topic or campaign. Similar to a search phrase, make sure it’s unique and not in use by anyone else and then plaster it across your campaign visuals.
- This phone case is my new favourite gadget - March 28, 2017
- Review: LuMee for the iPhone 7 Plus - March 6, 2017
- You can now upload multiple photos to Instagram posts - February 24, 2017
