Businesses often times struggle between balancing their interactive marketing initiatives and their traditional efforts such as direct mail, media advertising, billboards, etc. Utilizing the opportunities provided by digital marketing can lead to better tracking and reporting on traditional marketing campaigns as well.
Google Analytics. With the proper custom variables, interactive marketing can track performance of your direct mail campaigns. For instance, if you add QR codes to various direct mail pieces with custom parameters (source, medium, campaign, term, and content) to the website you are directing customers, the data can be tracked. This will not only help in tracking interested visitors, but it can also give you further information as to where a user navigated within your site after scanning the QR code. In fact, MoreVisibility has a URL tagging tool to assist you with coding your links properly.
A/B Testing. Whenever you run an ad, you typically have one of two goals: create brand awareness and/or prompt users to a direct response, such as requesting more information. In leveraging a special promotion from a newspaper or trade publication to attract visitors, A/B testing allows you to experiment with variations of a specific landing page to give you more insight on obtaining the best results. With just one main call-to-action, you can test several webpage designs and observe which one performed the best.
Here's a quick snapshot of what an experiment can look like in Google Website Optimizer. Although, Google has not defined a winner yet (image below), you can still have an idea as to which page variation is outperforming the original landing page from your print marketing ads.
Interactive marketing brings great value to traditional marketing. You just have to get a little creative in leveraging both worlds for your business needs.
