Marketing in a multi-channel environment can be a significnt challenge but those that get it right can yeild enormous rewards. One of the most challenging aspects is determining your return on your integrated online and offline media investments.
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Offline media — specifically print, television and radio — don't offer tracking for their resulting leads or sales. However, it is important to calculate the ROI from such media to properly allocate your marketing and sales dollars, especially in today's softening economy. Online search can capture demand generated by other media, it can help you determine the ROI for your offline marketing efforts.
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The following steps will help you measure the ROI of your offline media: To start, have a paid search campaign in place; unlike organic search, it will allow you to test in a more controlled environment. Now identify all potential terms or phrases someone might recall from the ad.
Next, bid on these keyword phrases well in advance of the media launch to assess pre-campaign and post-campaign results. Be sure to maintain the same position for a given paid search keyword before and during your offline media launch since different positions may be more or less likely to be clicked-on.
Then analyze the before and after numbers for this group of keywords to determine whether your offline advertising led to more search volume.
Finally, determine whether your offline media has a positive ROI by evaluating whether this incremental search traffic was worth at least the amount spent on your offline media initiatives. If your business is not all online, and you know, for example, that half of your business is done by phone or in stores, then you could double the search traffic (as a proxy) when calculating ROI. Search is a great marketing channel to help you better understand the ROI of your offline media. Next time we'll take a closer look at how it applies if you are geo-targeting your media buy.
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Please review additional articles on CRM, Internet Marketing and Marketing ROI at http://www.bb2e.com/resources.html
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