By Brian Reilly
You can enhance your traditional marketing with digital tools.
You’ve been spending marketing dollars on billboards, radio, TV, and direct mail to promote your bank for some time now. So how’s that been working out? Sure, you sometimes hear from new customers that they found you bank after seeing a billboard. But if your KPI for each of these traditional marketing channels is a “gut feeling” instead of measurable data, then it’s time to rethink your strategy.
Unfortunately, accurately tracking ROI from traditional marketing media like billboards is extremely difficult. In fact, I would argue that it’s downright impossible to fully measure the true value of most traditional marketing channels. This is especially problematic for bank marketing teams, since increasing the marketing budget is a rather difficult case to make without having hard data to prove all your hard work is impacting the bank’s bottom line.
Thankfully, there are a number of digital tactics that can help measure the impact of traditional marketing campaigns. Here are five of them:
1. Tracking URLs
Tracking URLs are an effective means of getting people to your website while also capturing their source. To set up a tracking URL you’ll first need to buy an easy to remember domain name or create a memorable URL on your existing website. Next, use Google’s URL builder to append unique campaign parameters to your URL. This will allow Google Analytics to properly track the source of your website visitors. Lastly, set up a redirect from the domain or URL you’ve created to the page on your site you’d like visitors to land on.
Within Google Analytics you can then navigate to Acquisition > Campaigns to see how many people came into the website as a result of the campaign, and more importantly, how many recipients completed a conversion action after visiting the website.
2. Custom Landing Pages
Similar to tracking URLs, landing pages allow you to direct people to a page on your site specifically for a marketing campaign. In this case you don’t need to use website redirects, since users are accessing a page on your website that is built exclusively for your campaign. Visitors on your landing pages should only find your landing page by way of your billboard, postcard, radio spot, etc. To avoid having your page indexed by search engines (which will skew your data) make sure to add the HTML code <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> to the <head> section of the landing page. Also make sure to remove your landing page from your website’s HTML site map. This will ensure that the only people visiting your landing page are in fact coming in from your marketing campaign.
3. Personalized URLs (PURLs)
A personalized landing page takes the typical landing page experience up a level. Instead of creating a single landing page on your site for everyone targeted by your campaign, each person who receives a direct mail advertisement from you is provided with their own personal landing page. This can look something like Brian.Reilly.yourbankdomain.com. Using a personal URL (PURL) for each recipient of your mailing campaign, it’s easy to see who has (or has not) responded to your bank’s offer. You can then make appropriate follow ups by phone, email, or subsequent mailings.
4. Remarketing Ads
After you’ve implemented a tracking URL or set up a landing page for your campaign, you can add measurable value by way of remarketing ads. Remarketing ads will be seen by your website visitors after they leave your website and continue browsing other websites. For those who are unfamiliar, remarketing works by adding what’s known as a tracking “cookie” to the browser of your website visitors based on a set of rules you define. For example, you could set up a remarketing list to capture any user who visits the custom landing page for your radio advertisement but left the page without converting. These non-converting visitors who came into the website as a result of your radio advertisement can then be lured back to your site with a different or better offer to close the deal.
5. Call Tracking
Often times, visitors who see a long website form or who are using a mobile device would much rather pick up the phone to respond to a special offer your bank is promoting. With a call tracking number, you don’t even need to build a landing page for your marketing campaign. Recipients of your postcard mailing or who saw your television commercial can simply dial the number you’ve set up for the campaign which is then forwarded to your actual phone number. The advantage of a tracking number is that you can measure how many calls resulted from your campaign. Often times call tracking providers will also capture data on the location of callers, call duration, time of call, and more.
Final Thoughts on Integrated Marketing Campaigns
While these digital tactics will certainly not measure the complete impact of your bank’s traditional marketing campaigns, they can provide an additional layer of measurable data. With this data, your marketing team can better understand which campaigns are providing the best ROI for your bank. Don’t trust your gut to guide your bank’s marketing strategy; let the data decide!
Brian Reilly is a digital marketing consultant with BankBound, a digital agency focused exclusively on the banking industry.
Online training in digital, mobile and social media from ABA.
