How channel management is evolving –
How can you integrate offline channels into the mix when balancing your digital efforts?
The first thing we need to understand when considering including offline spend as part of your digital channel management is how to accurately measure the success of offline marketing on online sales, and importantly how these impact sales across your different (easily tracked) online channels.
There are several ways to measure the impact of offline activity on online sales.
One simple method is to use regional testing to measure the traffic and sales uplift in regions where you are running offline activity against regions where you aren’t. By doing this you are able to find and impact of sales and traffic uplift from running offline activity. This will give you an idea of how your different digital channels are affected by offline activity, however applying this rate to all activity doesn’t help measure the variance in performance from different campaigns.
To do this you can look at the variance in search volumes on your brand terms against your generic terms (e.g. Nike Shoes against Sports shoes). If you can assume the percentage impact on each channel shown from running offline activity remains level (i.e. if offline activity has an impact of 5% on direct sales and 1% on search sales, the ratio between these two will remain the same). Then looking at the variance in search volumes on brand and non brand terms when running your activity helps you measure the effect across your online channels.
This is of course only one method for gauging the impact of offline activity and there are clear flaws to this (neglecting the effect your offline activity has on non brand searches, the requirement that you have a large enough pool of data to see a definitive effect, the need for stable conditions). However measuring the effect of your offline activity is key to understanding how you balance this against your online spend.
Now you have an idea of what this is doing to your online sales, the next thing you need to consider is how you use this to balance your overall marketing efforts. There are several considerations to make:
- How much demand is being created by your push channels (including both online and offline display)?
- Do you have enough pull activity to convert this demand into sales?
- How do you balance your budget between your push and pull channels effectively?
- What is having a greater impact on demand, Online Display, TV, Press, etc…?
- Is there long term gain in creating brand awareness in one month having a positive impact on conversion and click through rates in future months?
The list goes on however the key point to including offline channels in your online sales channel management is simple; you need to be able to accurately measure the effect of every type of offline activity not just on direct sales but on each individual online channel. Once you can do this, offline simply fits into your current channel management methodology.
Written by Alex Lockett, Senior Consultant
Tags: Channel Management, Fresh approach, Offline
