6 Ways to Track Your Offline Marketing Efforts

A lot of people will use digital signage and other offline marketing means to promote their companies. How many do you think track them? And okay, we get that it’s not always as easy to test our offline efforts as our online ones. But does that mean we shouldn’t try? Of course it doesn’t.

In putting some of the best digital signage displays out into the world, we’ve learned a lot about how to track offline marketing efforts. The results surprised us—turns out it is easy to keep an eye on how your campaigns are doing even in the offline world.

It doesn’t really matter which means you use, but knowing ways to track your offline marketing efforts puts you in a good position to continually improve your campaigns. In this article, we’re going to focus on ways to track your offline digital signage campaigns, but the principles can be applied to any offline advertising medium.

Here are a few good methods to have up your sleeve.

Promo code

Particularly in a store setting, you can’t beat the power of a classic promo code. This is where you create a unique code that isn’t used anywhere else, such as WEDNES15, and offer it to your customers as a discount reference point.

It’s really important here to use a unique code that your customers can’t find anywhere else. That way, you’ll know that anyone who uses it will only have seen it on your digital signage displays and you can monitor the effectiveness.

Unique landing page with link shortener

This is a similar method to the promo code, but instead of a code, you use a link shortener to send customers to a unique landing page. While this landing page will be live, it shouldn’t be present in your website navigation bar, or shared anywhere else (like on social media). That way, the chances of any customers stumbling across it on your website or on Google will be reduced.

The idea behind the link shortener is that it makes it easy for customers to remember which URL to head to once they’ve left your offline environment.

For example: https://www.mygreatstore.com/greatestoffereverytoday may be quite a stretch to remember. Using a link shortener such as bit.ly you could create the URL: bit.ly/greatstore. This is much easier for customers to remember and it can send them to any URL you want, long or short.

Once you’ve had this running for a while, you can either check in to the link shortener page to review how many clicks the link has had, or use Google Analytics to view clicks and any resulting sales. Simple!

Return on objectives

It’s likely every manager you’ve ever worked with has asked you to prove the “return on investment” (ROI) from your marketing efforts. This relates to a hard number of sales or customer acquisitions made from your marketing.

This is a super useful way to track your marketing, but is often only truly measurable when you’re working online. This is where return on objectives (ROO) come in handy.  

ROO are where you look at your key objectives and then see how you might measure them. For example, rather than pairing off your digital signage costs with the number of sales made from digital signage, you might decide your goal is to increase customer awareness. You could then track the number of customers mentioning your displays in store, online, or the decrease in staff questions due to the digital signs being in place.

Return on objective results can be quantitative but also qualitative, which makes it much easier to measure and think about the results of your offline marketing efforts. See more examples of this here.

Customer directives

As well as using specific links and offers, you can also better direct customers in a way that will help you to realize the results of your campaigns. For example, you’ve probably seen a store sign before that says: “Ask our staff about our 60-day return policy” or similar.

As soon as a customer asks your team about the offer they’ve seen or read, you know that people are taking note of your digital signage boards.

As long as the campaign or offer is something slightly out of the norm, you can easily measure how many customers bring it up in conversation.

Two-step marketing campaigns

Another way to track your marketing efforts is to create two parts to them. Say you show a hashtag on your digital screen and ask event attendees to use it in order to get a specific promo code. You could then track social media channels to determine who is using the hashtag, DM them a unique promo code and later, track who has used it on your future event or software product.

This additional step reduces pressure on the customer. You’re not asking them to buy from you there and then, but you are encouraging them down the line and are using a method that will help you to track where they’ve come from when they do eventually purchase something.

Add a “tell us where you found us” form

This is useful for any campaign, online or offline; look to implement a “tell us where you found us” form at the point of purchase or conversion from your customer. You could even offer a small incentive, such as a 5% off discount code, if they tell you where they first heard about your brand. This could help you segment customers into those that come from digital signage, outdoor advertising, events, Google, word of mouth, and more.

When you know where people found you, it becomes much easier to double-down on the marketing efforts that work. This can be rolled out across customer referral schemes too, if you offer an incentive to the referring customer or a unique code that they can give to their friends.

Track your offline marketing efforts more effectively

Now you have six new options to track your digital signage (and other offline marketing) efforts to better see the results of your hard work.

Give it a try. You’ll wonder why you didn’t track your offline marketing efforts in the first place!