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Bridging the Gap Between Online and Offline Marketing

The effectiveness of traditional offline marketing is hard to measure but there’s no reason why you can’t add online elements to achieve measurable ROI, audience engagement and social sharing.

The Relationship Between Online and Offline

Offline advertising directly affects online marketing initiatives. In order to be successful online, marketers must understand how customers are engaging with their brand offline.

40% of online searches make a purchase after being influenced by an offline channel. Maria Fernandez Guajardo, vice president at RetailNext, notes that 89% of consumers would sign up for mobile messages if they were personalized, citing a 2013 study by Vibes.

In-store promotions no longer need to be planned in advance, but can be triggered in reaction to uncharacteristically low traffic and notify customers via social media, an app or email. For example, if sales are particularly low one week, a mass text can be sent out to those who have opted into mobile notifications that there is a last minute sale at J. C. Penney.

Measuring Online and Offline Metrics

Online marketers typically use metrics like click-through rate, page views and impressions. These metrics can be problematic, however. Marketers are now attempting to use a hybrid of metrics that feature both online and offline metrics.

Offline Metrics

  • Return on Investment (ROI)– A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments.
  • Economic Value- The worth of a good or service as determined by people’s preferences and the tradeoffs they choose to make given their scarce resources, or the value the market places on an item.
  • Customer Loyalty- Customer loyalty is all about attracting the right customer, getting them to buy, buy often, buy in higher quantities and bring you even more customers.

Online Metrics

  • Click Through Rate (CTR)- way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website as well as the effectiveness of an email campaign by the number of users that clicked on a specific link.
  • Conversions- an eCommerce phrase most commonly used to describe the act of converting site visitors into paying customers.
Tracking can be Tricky

Apart from some kind of offer code or coupon system, how can you measure response to your traditional marketing campaign? Services such as Bit.ly provide shortened, tracked URLs that redirect to a page of your choice. Bit.ly in particular offers customized URLs. The only drawback is that it is brand anonymous. Read more about the perks of using Bit.ly.

QR Codes

QR codes are– special pictograms that can be scanned using barcode reading smartphone apps. They– are slightly old-hat but still in popular use. Encoded within these QR Codes are links to websites or web pages. Only smartphone users will ever scan these, therefore the page you send them to must be mobile-optimized.

Metrics Used to Determine Marketing ROI

 

Many people think they need to choose either offline marketing or online marketing methods, but the truth is that it is possible to seamlessly integrate both into your marketing strategy.

How does your business bridge the gap between online and offline marketing? Please share your strategies in the comments below. For more information on how you can bridge the gap between online and offline marketing, contact us!