As a marketer who utilizes multiple channels both online and offline, tracking the impact and effectiveness of campaigns is core to providing essential insight into how to optimize and improve marketing efforts so that the spend can go further and deliver a greater return on investment (ROI).
We should be aware that there are different expectation of campaigns: from building a community to driving brand awareness, to the one which is closest to the heart of many MDs — the bottom line. One tricky aspect which I’ve witnessed through offline marketing is tracking the ROI in a digital environment. This is in part down to the disconnect between offline medias and the online world.
With the spend on TV advertising in the US reaching $79 billion in 2015 and print being $28 billion, according to Strategy Analytics, it seems that offline media still holds a heavy marketing budget.
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As marketers we have that gut feeling if a campaign is working, and through careful data curation we can prove to some degree that these offline campaigns are successful online. But how do you know if visitors who had seen your TV advert and later clicked on the site from a non-related paid search ad, had in fact remembered your brand from the TV advert? This is a difficult aspect to measure.
Talking from experience in trying to secure budget for TV campaigns and demonstrate the impact they can have, we look at the web traffic at the time the TV advert ran and can see an uplift in traffic for a particular amount of time —for us it was seven minutes. This gives a good indication of the direct impact of the TV ads and also gives you a quick result which can then be calculated to a direct impact ROI.
This behavior is very much born of the new multi-screen era we live in. For many of us we will watch a TV show and during the adverts, or even the shows themselves, play on our mobile phones or tablets; checking our social profiles, emails, joining in on chats or looking up that actor’s name because you just can’t place where you recognize him from…
With this multi-screening behavior becoming more the norm, many TV networks push hashtags and conversation groups to help measure the impact online. This is particularly evident around the bigger shows. Where forums and live debates happen during the shows, this has taken social media right to the forefront when it comes to helping measure the impact of offline TV ads to the digital world. Now I’m sure you have all seen this and this isn’t anything new, and we see those stats pass around pertaining to what people were talking about during big live events.
But what if on social media you were able to select target groups of people based not only on their demographics but also the TV shows or channels they like? And time those boosted posts to run during the same dates and after your TV adverts ran? Well thankfully these options are available to you, so you can start to help increase and measure those touch points. Through our testing we have found this to be a successful means of boosting your content.
And through re-enforcing the message from the TV adverts to the right people at the right time we have been able to measure a direct impact not only through the more traditional means of uplift but through additional social traffic. As marketers we are all aware of the clichés of “3’s the magic number” and “right time, right place” — with multi-screening you can condense this right down to the minute and get a better ROI to help build your business and marketing campaigns out.
With spend for social media advertising set to reach $12.67 billion in 2016 in the U.S. alone, according to eMarketer, it seems that the weight and impact of using this touch point is becoming a more important part of your overall plan. And with this multi-screen behavior as it is, it would be hard to see why this trend won’t continue.
Takeaway Point
The key takeaway point from this is: if you are running TV advertisements or any offline media, ensure you create digital touch points so you can better collate the impact which these marketing efforts have caused. And to get the maximum bang for your buck the targeting tools within social media can offer that precision.
Matthew Rogers heads up the digital marketing team for online gift retailer toxicfox.co.uk, which specializes in personalized and funny gifts. Based near Manchester UK, toxicfox.co.uk has continued to grow for the past three years through well-timed and measured marketing campaigns and offering gift inspiration to its customers.
