Online advertising and promotion is great, especially when you get free traffic from the search engines.
But you can’t beat offline promotions, especially print campaigns, for growing your business.
The pre-requisite is knowing which publications your prospects are reading. For vertical industries it’s easy. Consumer and mass markets not so.
This is the number one way I’m growing my business in 2008 — every other front-end marketing activity is secondary, simply because of the speed and low cost of customer acquisition that’s possible with direct response adverts. I thought I’d share this with you — there are so many business types and even 100% Internet businesses that can grow through offline customer acquisition.
The key is to implement a system that tells you which of your print campaigns are working (profitable) and which are losing money.
Here’s the system I use to track online response to print campaigns like inserts, line ads and larger advertisements and even direct mail.
The most important poart of this tactic to is register campaign specific domain names that are totally separate from your main site. This features in your promotion, not your main company web address.
Companies that advertise their main web address in print are unable to calculate exactly how many online responses the ad generated. And thus are unable to optimise their adverts or determine the cost of customer acquisition. If you do that at the moment, embrace this tactic — it can transform how you integrate online marketing into your business.
On that new web site, you just want a single page that has a ‘campaign tracker’ install, a small piece ofcode that automatically forwards (redirects) visitors back to your main web site (or even better, landing page).
That special code also automatically increments a counter, so you will know exactly how many people typed that campaign specific web address after viewing the print piece.
In the UK I use UKReg.com for domain names and Zen.co.uk for hosting. For the special tracking code I’m referring to, check out Hypertracker.com or similar services.
On your main web site (or landing page): If any of those redirected prospects take action and fill in a form to volunteer their name and email address for example, or if they buy something, they should of course see a thank you page.
In that thank you page is some more special code, which sends a signal back to the ‘campaign tracker’ mentioned above to let it know one of the prospects has now converted, (and become either an active sales-lead or paying customer.)
This system allows you to confidently run prints ads — because you can see for every pound spent exactly how much revenues are generated on the back-end of your business.
If your adverts also provide phone numbers and/or postal response forms (coupons etc.), then those will need to be coded, or if prospects make a phone call you need to ask them for the advert code (we’ve all seen “Please quote Dept. AB123 when you call”).
When you enter the personal data captured by the front-end marketing into your database, make sure you also enter the campaign code. That allows you to then analyse revenues and ROI of print campaigns and publication, regardless of whether customers were acquired by phone, post, fax… or even through your web site.
-Ed.
PS. I’ll post a diagram tomorrow that shows this tactic more clearly.
