Isn’t the digital world wonderful? Since everything is tracked and connected to another part of the jigsaw, it takes seconds to check the performance of marketing techniques. Have an ad on Google? Head into the analytics and see how many people are clicking through within seconds. But what about the offline world?
Unfortunately, the inability to measure performance has always been one of the biggest sticking points for marketers. For some, it’s enough to forgo all offline marketing techniques and simply stick with the online world. This is a shame because, even in 2021, many offline advertising techniques are still worth exploring.
In this guide, we want to address the relationship between offline and online marketing channels. Also, we want to explore the idea that some measurement strategies are more important for optimization than others.
The Customer Journey
These days, consumers expect a high standard of advertising from businesses. Whether offline or online, they expect their needs to be met at every stage of the funnel. As well as shopping for brands on Google, they will take their research onto Facebook, Reddit, and more. In some cases, they complete lots of online research before then heading off to a physical store.
If you’re to provide the omnichannel experience that consumers demand, it starts with an understanding of the sales funnel and many touchpoints. Think of your own experiences as a customer; how many times have you seen a Facebook ad and purchased a product immediately? Probably not very many. Instead, you see an ad, sign up for a newsletter, read about the product in a magazine, and take many other steps before spending your money.
While each step may only contribute a little, they’re all critical in the journey from stranger to customer. According to some estimates, customers interact with brands eight times before finally becoming a customer.
Before you worry about anything else, you first need to work out which touchpoints customers engage with as they travel through the sales funnel. Once you highlight the best-performing channels, you’ll know to place more emphasis on these while improving or removing those that don’t contribute to conversions. Among other things, this shows the importance of offline and online marketing tracking.
Common Challenges for Marketing Teams
Although most don’t like to admit it, they fall short when it comes to tracking offline and online performance. One of the biggest problems is that they treat all channels individually and then improve each in isolation. Of course, this doesn’t make sense considering that we’ve just seen how customers interact with several before converting.
For example, let’s say that you head into your ad account and see low impressions and CTRs on a display ad. After seeing this, you improve the ads based on these two metrics. While this might generate short-term results, it doesn’t consider the whole omnichannel approach.
As we’ve already seen, marketers also have trouble monitoring the performance of offline channels. Therefore, they eventually abandon offline marketing materials and stick with only what they can visualize.
This year, the best solution is to bring offline and online marketing measurements together. Why? Because you can consider the whole omnichannel approach and create a strategy that resonates with your audience at every single stage. When you consider your approach as a whole, you create a strategy that pushes prospective leads through the funnel effectively.
Tracking Offline Marketing Performance
Before we move onto the process of combining offline and online data, you first need to know about the important data that enables offline marketing tracking. To start, you need the right data. Without the right data, you can’t make any marketing decisions.
While online campaigns generate accessible data, offline channels are more difficult to monitor. You can’t just sign into an offline ad account and review traffic, clicks, engagement, and other metrics. Yet, this doesn’t mean that you’re entirely powerless.
Instead, you need to cleverly combine second-party and first-party sources of data. When you run an ad in a magazine or newspaper, send people to a specific subscription list. While you can’t see how many impressions the ad campaign generates, you can see how many people sign up to this list. Since this list only contains people who sign up from the newspaper, the waters aren’t muddied by other marketing techniques.
Elsewhere, leading marketers also use data from smart TVs and TV box top data. Finally, you can also take advantage of radio broadcast zip code areas. As well as gathering data yourself, work with media companies so that you learn the specific campaigns that played a role in converting consumers.
Additionally, don’t be afraid to look back at old sales data. When do quiet periods in sales occur? When do spikes occur? As well as learning about your campaigns, this also sheds a light on seasonal trends, economic factors, and other contributors to sales.
For many marketers, the answer is media mix modeling. While this certainly has its positives, you can’t solely rely on the technique. For one thing, you’ll struggle to get insights into your campaigns in real-time. If media mix modeling and other techniques only review the past, you’re taking a reactive approach rather than a proactive one; it’s like driving while looking in the rear-view mirror.
Bring All Metrics and Measurement Together
If you’re reading this article with a sense of dread, the solution isn’t going to be lots of manual effort that gives your marketing team a long headache. Instead, you’ll find online tools that bring offline and online analytics together for the betterment of your omnichannel strategy. With the right tool, you’ll pay attention to the sales funnel and consider each touchpoint as part of a larger journey rather than improving them in isolation.
One strong example and a good starting point for your research is Trapica - an artificial intelligence and machine learning tool that has several features for marketers. Ignoring the incredible ad optimization automation tool, Trapica has an intelligence tool that teaches business secrets about their online and offline consumers.
Leveraging both search and social channels, Trapica has advanced AI algorithms to provide intelligence that propels the business forward. Over time, you’ll not only learn what happened in your marketing strategy but also why it happened. Using both offline and online data, you improve the marketing strategy and become a leader in the field.
Instead of always looking backward, Trapica helps make the transition to a proactive approach. Now, you’re predicting what’s ahead and getting ready for these adjustments. When you know what’s coming, you can make more accurate decisions for both your offline and online strategies. You resonate with the audience, encourage engagement, and generate conversions.
In recent times, one method that has developed to cope with the combination of offline and online data is unified marketing measurement (UMM). As an attribution model, you normalize first and then correlate. All data is then comparable, and you can assess the efficacy of touchpoints on a level playing field. How much of an impact does touchpoint A have on conversions compared to touchpoint B?
Hopefully, the solutions in this guide have given you some confidence for bringing your offline and online marketing data together. So long as you have the right software and solid data collection techniques, you can consider the whole omnichannel approach and encourage prospective leads more effectively than competitors.
Before too long, you’re comparing in-store techniques with digital exposure. With better visibility of the full sales funnel and every touchpoint, you know the areas that need improving the most. Since you’re also looking forwards, you don’t need to guess, and you have even more impetus for your marketing strategy.
How do touchpoints interact with one another and influence each other? You’ll soon have the insights required to answer this question.
Measuring ROI for an Omnichannel Strategy
We don’t blame you for being confused when told to use both offline and online channels and not knowing how to measure an omnichannel strategy. Thankfully, you now have the answers and can implement a strategy that meets the needs of customers both now and in the future.
If you want to resonate with customers more effectively than the competitors, it makes sense to adopt this approach this year. Remember, Trapica is a force in this field. Whether your business is big or small, this tool will integrate with your marketing system and provide the insights you need to understand your brand, customers, and advertising efforts.
Just in case you need more convincing, Trapica also has an ad optimization automation tool. Link the tool to your ad accounts and it automatically optimizes targeting, bidding, budgeting, A/B testing, and other aspects of your campaigns.
Measuring offline marketing channels was once difficult, but you can gather data cleverly and utilize this in an omnichannel strategy. Why not get started today?
