5 Ways to Track Offline Marketing Efforts

How to Track Your Offline Marketing Campaigns

How can you track the results of offline marketing campaigns such as billboards, posters, magazine ads, or TV ads? Some marketers might say it’s impossible. But, we’re about to prove them wrong.

With the right strategy in place, you can track your offline marketing campaigns to analyze the results and discover whether they’re worth the investment. And no, you don’t have to be a marketing genius to do it.

In this post, we’ll show you why it’s important to track your offline marketing campaigns and how you can track them all by yourself without having to spend a fortune.

Let’s get started, shall we?

 

Does Offline Marketing Still Work?

Today, it’s easier to create an online marketing campaign than ever before. Almost anyone can easily launch a Google AdWords campaign or a Facebook Ads campaign instantly without having any prior experience.

To make things even better, online marketing allows you to target specific audiences and easily track the progress and the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.

With all these advanced technologies in place, some might wonder if offline marketing still worth the effort.

Well, believe it or not, offline marketing still has its benefits. In fact, according to a study, offline marketing campaigns can actually help boost the effectiveness of online campaigns by 40 percent.

Also, offline marketing still plays a major role in branding and influence as well. Which is why most businesses still invest heavily in billboards and TV ads.

Why Track Offline Marketing Campaigns?

The biggest downside to offline marketing is that there’s no way for you to track the effectiveness of your campaigns. There is no analytics for billboards and posters. You just keep pouring in money hoping for the best.

At least, that used to be the case with offline marketing. But, not anymore. Now, there are ways you can go around this problem quite easily by mixing your offline marketing with online analytics.

This allows you to track conversions and leads to understand whether or not your offline marketing campaigns work and which campaigns are more effective. You can then use the results to invest in the most effective strategies.

 

How to Get Started

There are several different ways you can track your offline marketing. Depending on the type of campaign you’re running, you can decide how to track your conversions based on different strategies.

Here’s how you can get started.

 

1. Create Landing Pages

Creating offline marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your website homepage is a poor strategy that will simply be a waste of your money and efforts.

Instead, you should create landing pages for each and every promotion of your marketing campaigns. This way, you’ll be able to easily track the page with analytics and, more importantly, convert your visitors into leads with an effective email opt-in campaign.

The only problem with this strategy is that the URL of the page tends to get a bit longer when you create custom landing pages. These are not only difficult to show in banners and posters, but also makes it harder for people to remember.

Which is why this next step is crucial for tracking offline marketing.

 

2. Use UTM Codes and QR Codes

You can analyze your landing page visitors with Google Analytics. But, only to a certain point. For example, if you were to promote your landing page through different mediums like billboards and magazine ads, how can you measure the success of each campaign and figure out which drove the most visitors?

This can be easily fixed by adding a tracking code to your URL. These are called UTM codes. If you’re using WordPress, you can use a tool like MonsterInsights UTM Builder to create custom tracking codes to be used with your different offline marketing campaigns.

Then you can use a URL shortener to create a shorter custom URL. This will help you recognize different traffic sources in Google Analytics.

Using QR Codes is another effective strategy to implement tracking in a convenient way which also allows users to easily scan the code using their smartphones to get more information about promotions.

 

3. Utilize Coupon Codes

Another popular way to track your promotions is by using coupon codes. These usually work in print media, such as leaflets, flyers, and newspaper/magazine ads.

While you provide the users with a discount to purchase your products, you also get to use those coupon codes to track your marketing campaigns by creating different coupon codes for each campaign.

Whenever someone uses the coupon code on your website to buy a product, you’ll know where they came from.

 

4. Track Phone Calls

It may be hard to believe, but it is possible to track phone calls. Using this method you can track your ad conversions via phone calls to make the most of your offline marketing campaigns.

Certain services, like CallRail, provides marketers with solutions for tracking phone calls, record calls, and measuring call conversions with advanced reporting and analytics.

While this doesn’t necessarily relate to website promotions, it may come in handy when you want to include multiple Call To Actions (CTA) in your offline marketing.

 

5. Leverage Augmented Reality

What does the future hold for offline marketing? Will it still work? Would people still interact with posters and flyers in the future? Well, the technology has found a way to make offline ads even more entertaining with augmented reality.

Shazam recently rolled out an innovative new feature turning the music discovery app into an augmented reality solution for brands. Basically, this allows brands and businesses to create print ads with digital interactions by adding a small Shazam icon in the ads.

When users scan the Shazam icons in print ads using the app, they receive more information about the business related to the ad on their own phones.

It’s an incredibly fun and an entertaining way to make offline ads interactive. Of course, Shazam aims to provide businesses with analytics for these ads as well.

 

Summary

Hopefully, these tactics will make you think twice about the way you approach offline marketing in your next promotion.

As a modern marketer, you should always be aware of how to take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. Mixing online marketing with offline marketing can bring you much better results than limiting yourself to just one strategy.