This week I’m writing to you from rural Victoria up near the snowy mountains where I grew up.
Even while traveling through the lush green countryside I have still been thinking about ways to improve your online marketing effectiveness
Often I see people running TV, Radio or Print ads and sending people back to their website, which is great because if you have a good site it will do a lot of the work in educating and qualifying leads for you. Or if you have an E-commerce store then it will sell for you.
The problem is if you send them back to your website you don’t know how effective each ad is. The Radio guys says, “well your ad was played 20 times this week and 50,000 people heard it”, so what??
If half the planet heard it and no one bought anything, then your ads are a waste of your time and money. Time and money you could be spending on a nice vacation to Hawaii or the Swiss Alps.
Today I want to share a simple yet highly effective way to track any marketing you do offline. This is one of the pieces of advice I gave one of my high-end coaching clients 1 month ago and she got very interesting results.
It works like this – Lets say you are running a promotion for one of your products.
Step 1 – You need to brand the promotion. For my own humor lets pretend you are a lawyer and do No Win, No Fee jobs.
Lets call the promotion “Get out of jail free” (I know I have weird sense of humor haha!).
Step 2 – Set up a page on the website about the promotion and use your key term “Get out of jail free” as the heading.
Step 3 – Register the domain name getoutofjailfree.com
Step 4 – Have your Webmaster redirect the domain to the promotion page. This means if someone visits getoutofjailfree.com they will land on your promotion page instead of trying to get them to remember to go www.xyzlawyers.com/get-out-of-jail-free.
Step 5 – In your TV, Radio, Print or any other ads you reference getoutofjailfree.com.
But there is one catch you MUST have a different domain for every channel you use or you wont know which channel is working for you.
For example you might have getoutofjailfree.com for your TV advertising and have jailfree.com for Radio, and then freepass.com for your print ad.
Now in Google analytics (I am assuming you have it installed on your website, and if not, slap yourself and get it asap.) when you run your ads for offline media you will see visits show up under “referrals”.
These referrals will be from one of your domains that are redirected (getoutofjailfree.com, jailfree.com, freepass.com), so now you know how effective each medium is.
One thing I need to mention – In your ad you should only have one call to action. E.G visit getoutofjailfree.com. Do Not give them a phone number as well, Do Not give them your main website, Do Not give them your business name.
If you follow these simple steps you will be able to hone your marketing and make it more profitable.
Are you using any other techniques for tracking offline marketing online?
