Despite the rise of digital marketing, a study by Statista predicts that companies will have a total spending of $175.9 billion on offline advertising. This is 4 billion more than last year. The figures show how offline ads continue to play a huge role in your marketing mix. Thus, it is high time to level up your techniques in measuring your offline ads ROI to gain better insights into its impacts on your business.
Measuring your offline ads' ROI might seem a lot more challenging than it sounds. After all, it isn't like your digital marketing campaigns where you can simply use built-in tools from your software to leverage data and analytics. Nonetheless, analyzing your offline marketing metrics is necessary for optimizing and improving your overall strategies.
With that, here is a quick guide on how to measure offline marketing performance effectively.
6 Ways to Measure the Offline Advertising ROI
1. Integrate online and offline data
Nowadays, marketing efforts span across various media platforms—from billboards, TV, social media channels, and personal websites. Focusing on individual channels can be time-consuming. Moreover, it fails to capture the complexity of your customers’ journey throughout your marketing campaigns. After all, your customers can encounter several touchpoints during your campaigns. This makes it tougher to pinpoint what exactly had influenced them to buy from your brand.
To properly measure your offline ads ROI, you should consider integrating your online and offline marketing analytics and data. This can give you insight into your customers’ journey throughout your marketing campaigns in a more holistic manner. From there, you can extract your consumers’ behavior in relation to their offline media consumption. But first, you must make sure to access quality data. This requires you to determine which offline ads your consumers are engaging with.
By integrating data from both digital and offline ads, you can then create a unified marketing measurement model that can calculate the ROI of every marketing spending. This is also known as an omnichannel measurement approach where you gather data from multiple choices and value offline ads together with online ones.
2. Create customized URLs or links for offline campaigns
Unlike digital media, offline media does not offer any tangible way to count how many consumers engage with your ads. However, there is a roundabout way of doing just that. One effective way on how to track offline marketing campaigns is through a dedicated page. These are custom URLs or links that can redirect your consumers to your landing page or homepage.
This allows you to count how many visitors you get via the URL or link associated with a specific offline ad. You can use a web analytics solution such as Google Analytics to track traffic, conversions, and customer data. This lets you determine which ads have the highest response rates and which offline ads are more effective. So that in future campaigns, you can then focus on the most responsive and valuable offline channel to further increase your ROI.
3. Assign specific promo codes for each ad
Promo and discount codes can benefit both you and your customers. Through it, your customers can save money while purchasing something of value for them. On the other hand, it keeps them interested and engaged with your brand. More than that, you can also use it to measure your offline ads ROI. By assigning specific promo or discount codes for each ad, you can easily track the revenue back to its source.
You can insert promo codes in any of your offline materials. You can have it in your TV and radio ads, flyers, billboards, and newspaper ads. Giving away codes encourages your customers to avail of your products or services whether online or in physical stores. In turn, this gives you a measurable way to determine the impacts of your offline ad and see its causal effect on your revenue.
4. Leverage offline brand tracking software
Manually monitoring the performance of your offline ad can be time consuming. Moreover, it can result in inaccurate data and results. Fortunately, there are various tools and software that can help you track your brand’s offline reach. Brand tracking is a reliable way to track all your campaigns—both online and offline.
Using brand tracking software also enables you to segment results into various target audiences, providing more accurate information regarding who exactly is impacting your revenue. To further streamline your marketing campaigns, you can also check out this guide on selecting marketing software.
5. Take advantage of QR codes
Customers often encounter your offline ads in passing. They can just be driving past your billboard by the road, or channel surfing TV. Unlike online ads, your customers have no opportunity to explore and interact with your offline ads more. And while customized URLs and links can redirect them to your company’s homepage, your customers might not even have the time to remember or type it down. This is where QR codes can come in useful.
According to PYMNTS.com, two-thirds of consumers are more compelled to interact with a brand using QR codes. By simply taking out their phones and scanning the code itself, they can easily access your web pages or ecommerce stores. It is a quick and painless process that won’t take up too much of their time. From there, you can easily track where your visitors are coming from and which offline ad they had interacted with.
6. Use dedicated contact details for offline campaigns
Integrating data from your offline and online campaigns is one thing. But using the same email inbox or phone numbers for both can make it harder to distinguish which channels are attracting more customers. Hence, it is a good idea to keep your contact details separate for both your online and offline ads.
For example, you can use a dedicated email address for your newspaper ad so that the content of your inbox will only have customers who have encountered your offline ad in the newspaper. This allows you to measure responses directly from each offline campaign. You can also do the exact same thing for telephone numbers and SMS messaging.
Final Thoughts
Finding the right balance between online and offline marketing can give your brand the recognition it deserves. This requires you to properly measure the ROI of both your online and offline campaigns. For digital campaigns, this task seems easier. But for offline campaigns, you might find yourself struggling to find an effective way to do so.
Fortunately, there are tools that can help you with that. You can check out brand monitoring tools like Latana, which can help you track your brand across different channels. Moreover, you can utilize promo codes, QR codes, and customized URLs to help you trace back revenues from its offline source. Whichever medium you pick, you will enjoy the benefits of effectively measuring offline advertising ROI.
