How To Track Your Offline Marketing Efforts

Marketing, in any form, should always be administered in a way that makes it possible to receive comprehensive data that determine the effectiveness of each marketing campaign such as direct mail, TV ads, newspaper ads, and more. This method is coined in many business circles as tracking, and it is something that you need to do to go far in your marketing efforts.

Marketing campaigns require money. As a businessman, your job is to earn an amount that exceeds your marketing expenditures. Otherwise, all efforts that were made will be a total waste. 

Tracking offline marketing efforts is a task that needs to be undertaken in any type of business - be it an old one or a new one. In fact, tracking is most crucial when the business is just starting out, since all the gathered information from the beginning to the present can help create a more comprehensive graph. This makes it easier for you to make the correct decisions as far as the allocation of marketing funds is concerned. As a result, your marketing campaigns become less costly and more effective in providing you good results.

Here are two methods that can help you track your offline marketing efforts. 	

Tracking Print and Direct Mail Marketing Online
Once you've launched an offline marketing campaign, you'd do better to produce multiple ads. These ads should not be identical when it comes to slogans and the call to action text. This is because you still need to determine which advertisement can produce the best results. 

So how do we segregate the results of each advertisement in a way that can be used for comparative data? It's really simple: use designated domains. Using the log files, the designated domains can help you track the visitors of your website. Make sure that you assign a respective landing page to each of the designated domains in order to funnel each piece of information correctly. To understand how this works, I'll show you how it looks like. As an example, let's assume that the business has something to do with slot cars. 

Direct Mail Text 1 - Tracking Domain - TheGreatSlotCars.com
Ad 1 - Tracking Domain - VisitYourGreatSlotCars.com
Ad 2 - Tracking Domain - YourGreatSlotCarsOnline.com

If you notice, each advert leads to a unique URL. Once you've gathered all the results, you'd be able to determine which advertisement enticed the most people and which one produced the least. 

Of course, it's possible that extraneous variables can influence the outcome. These are rather theoretical, so what I can advise you is add some notes detailing these variables. These notes can come in handy in the future when the time comes you are required to do a business review. 

The same method can be used in several types of marketing campaigns such as TV commercials, telephone calls, radio ads and newsprint media. Just apply the same principle depending on the technicalities involved in the type of campaign. If you track your offline marketing efforts, taking pains in recording data both big and small, they can help you determine what works and what doesn't and might help you think of a groundbreaking business idea. In the long run, this should bode well for your advertising campaign and help your business go beyond your expectations.
