How Are You Measuring Your Offline Analytics?

The Sprocket Report

Between Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and all the other online data collections, business owners have more ways to track their marketing efforts than ever before. But what about your offline marketing?

Your marketing agency, social media manager and website tech can all provide you with an amazing amount of data to understand how your current marketing strategy is working and what you should tweak going forward.

Traffic reports show your users’ geographic location, whether they are male or female, their ages, their education and income levels and more. You can track what platform they were on before they went to your website and the path they took through your site once they got there.

But you probably have many offline interactions. Are you tracking those? It’s not as easy to do, but you can get a better idea of your offline marketing success with a little planning. Here are three simple steps to get started:

Build a special landing page

Let’s say you have an event coming up and you are actually mailing out paper invitations. If you include response cards it would be obvious how guests heard about your event. You could also ask invited guests to respond online at a special landing page such as www.nonprofit.org/event.

Landing pages can also be printed on business cards for specific networking. Business cards are pretty cheap, so printing a batch for networking at a conference would let you track how many of the people you met were interested enough in your pitch to learn more, for instance.

Use special landing pages for T-shirts, billboards, trucks postcards and other visual marketing to drive folks to your website. Just remember to keep the URL easy to remember and use different landing pages for different campaigns so you get good data.

Use a code word or number

Creating a special offer that is only available with a specific code word or number lets you know immediately which of your marketing campaigns prompted the response. Whether they contact you online, by phone or in person, when they give you the code you’ll know.

New marketing campaigns should use new codes so you can compare results by campaign for future tweaking. But you don’t necessarily need to build new web pages if you are giving a discount on your usual products or services.

Ask them how they heard about you

It’s a simple question without any of the emotion produced when asking for a testimonial or referral. You can email a quick survey with that one question after they contact you. The email may even be an auto-response after a specific transaction. Or you could ask when they call or when they walk in the door.

Providing a multiple choice list makes it even easier for them to respond in an online, email or paper request. If you are asking in person, just remember to note their answer in the proper place so you can use the data later.

We have all heard the old chestnut about how half of marketing works, but it’s hard to tell which half. While online marketing has tools to help us measure our efforts better than ever before, offline marketing is still difficult to assess. Since many of us continue to have significant offline customer contact, measuring to improve our marketing only makes good sense.

Sprocket Websites is your partner for digital marketing. If you and your marketing agency are planning a super campaign, we can implement the technology to launch and track it. Give us a call today to discuss how we can help!

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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Full biography

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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