How to Track the Success of Your Print Marketing Activity
8th May 2015
If you use digital marketing techniques like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to promote your product or service, you’ll know that these tools provide you with a wealth of data to easily track your campaign uptake and success.
It’s for this reason that many marketers chose to allocate such a significant proportion of their budget to online marketing channels.
However, choosing to use a range of marketing and advertising methods as part of your marketing mix will ensure that your message reaches a wider audience than focusing your efforts on digital platforms alone.
This may seem like a less appealing medium for you to use because print isn't as quick to set up or change as digital marketing and it also doesn't provide the same level of insight or analytics – or does it?
Effective marketing, regardless of the size of budget available, involves using a layered message approach. As long as that message is consistent and relevant to your audience and the more they hear and see it across as range of channels, the more awareness it will generate and the more successful it is likely to be.
But if print is part of a wider marketing activity that is using multiple channels, how do you separate the traffic and uptake rate generated just from print? Well that’s depends on how you set up the campaign material. If you build data generation into your print material from the outset then it is easy to accurately track the success rate of offline and print marketing campaigns.
Coupons or Discount Codes
So how can print marketing provide you with similar levels of data as digital channels? Using print specific incentives like coupons or discount codes that drive traffic to your website or brick and mortar business is possibly the best measure of how successful your campaign is.
After all if the incentive to use the code doesn't appeal to your audience, or there are too many restrictions and limitations placed on retrieving the offer then regardless of the platform used, your campaign is going to fail.
QR Codes
Incorporating QR Codes (quick response codes) into your print campaigns can also provide you with valuable campaign data. As these codes are free and quick to generate they can easily be used on print materials.
The user must perceive that there is a significant payoff for them to access the code for it to be successful. So it is essential to make the purpose and benefit of using the QR code clear and prominent if this is going to be your primary tracker of success.
Response Codes
Adding a unique code that users have to enter online or tell you at the time of ordering or booking also gives you a way to track uptake. These types of codes are great to generate quiet granular information because the code can be tagged to a specific location or region.
For example, if you’re using leaflets or brochures, you can use the same design and content for the entire campaign and change only the response code to monitor the uptake rate in each region or location.
Other tracking methods such as using unique or specific landing pages, text lines or phone numbers are also really effective to use, but these require more expertise and cost to setup than the suggestions listed.
So as you can see, once you build the data generation into your print activity you can accurately track the success and uptake rate of your print marketing activity. Trying to backtrack and determine what proportion of traffic came from your print activity will be much more difficult to do.
