Which Part of Your Advertising Budget Works?
Posted on 23rd September 2019
Your advertising budget’s return on investment (ROI) is really important. It would be wonderful to show how every penny delivers results, but it’s not that straightforward.
One of the reasons digital advertising is so popular with marketers is that there are so many things you can measure – and it’s all built-in. You can monitor click-through rates (CTR), social media engagements and goal tracking in Google Analytics. You can review it every hour if you want to. You can see what’s working and what happens if you make changes
Did you know that it’s just as easy to track the effectiveness of your print advertising campaigns and to see what happens when you make changes? Here are some tips:
How did you hear about us?
Your aim is to raise the profile of your business and increase sales. You can use your printed advertising to bring people to your website and measure the increased traffic.
However, it can be difficult to know which visitors have arrived through organic Google searches or as a direct result of your advertisements.
One easy way to find out is to ask your visitors ‘How did you hear about us?’ when you receive a new enquiry or sale. If your sales are online, you can include a drop-down menu of your different channels at checkout.
Special landing pages on your website
One clever way to know exactly how your print advertisement is working is to create a special landing page on your website, just for people who respond to that advertisement.
Make the web page’s address short and easy to use and carry through the same themes and offers as your advertisement – that’s what brought people to your landing page after all.
To really drive the response, you can make the offer unique to that advertisement and for a limited time only.
You will be able to see how many visits your page receives, who goes on to make a purchase or to call you.
If you’re running a campaign, you can use different landing pages for each advertisement or channel to see what works best.
As well as a specific landing page you can also use a single telephone number to keep track of responses to your advertisement too.
Coupons and offers
Everyone loves a bargain, so you can use discount codes, coupons and vouchers that are unique to your advertisement. When a customer uses them, you’ll know exactly why they have contacted you.
You can even include free offers, access to events or extra products when they make their first purchase. Or you can even invite them to your website to print a voucher that they can redeem in store or to complete an online form with our special offer code.
This is a great way find out more about where your customers are, how long it takes them to respond and which offers work best.
Timing is everything
To understand the difference your advertisements make you will need to have a clear picture of your normal patterns of enquiries and sales. By monitoring the changes when your advertisement is running, you will be able to see the difference it has made.
It’s even easier to keep track if you target a specific product or service in your advertisement. You will be able to compare performance against other areas of our business at the same time.
If visits to your website or phone calls increase, but you don’t make any more sales then you know that you are attracting attention but your customers aren’t finding quite what they’re looking for. Make small changes to the way you present your product or service to find out what works best.
QR Codes
Scanning a quick response (QR) code in your printed advertisement can bring people straight to your landing page, a product page or a video, for example. This is a really interesting way to provide a bridge between your digital and printed channels.
Learn and improve
Collecting all this information is interesting, but it can also help you improve your advertising over time. Here are three questions you can ask yourself:
1. Did your enquiries or sales increase overall?
2. Did people use your offer codes?
3. Did people buy the product or service you were promoting?
If the answer to any of the questions is ‘no’, then you will need to rethink your approach. Our best tip is to change just one thing at a time, so that you know what makes a difference.
We’re always happy to give some advice, so please give us a call to talk about your next promotion or campaign.
Tagged as: Marketing Budgets, Marketing Strategy
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