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How You Can Measure Print Marketing Performance

How You Can Measure Print Marketing Performance

In this day and age, we are continually being bombarded with advertisements. Every site you visit has ads posted up and down the sides (not to mention dreaded pop-ups), and every TV show you watch has commercials. With so much information flying back and forth, information overload is inevitable. Digital advertising has seen a massive boom lately, and with quick analytics available at the push of a button, print marketing has unjustly become the stepchild of the marketing family. Print marketing should never be left behind, as it’s a handy way to get your business physically in front of consumers. While it’s easy to click out of a pop-up ad, seeing a billboard as you drive down the street is more difficult to avoid. Tracking and measuring print marketing performance is no more difficult than measuring digital performance; it just takes a little bit more planning. 

Measuring print marketing analytics comes down to planning. It’s remarkably easy to get an ROI out of your print marketing if you know what to put on your printed pieces. Putting a billboard up is costly, and if you don’t include a particular number or website for people to visit, it’s useless. Flyers can be handed out en masse, but without a way to draw people in, they’ll end up in the garbage or on the ground outside. Measuring your print marketing performance begins by putting something to measure into the actual printed materials. This can be a classic call to action, such as ‘call us today!’ with a phone number specifically for that ad. There are services available which create faux numbers which route to your business line, which means you can track how many calls are coming from one particular number (i.e., your advertisement’s number). 

If phone calls aren’t your thing, don’t work for your particular business, or seem like too much trouble, don’t count out print marketing quite yet. Phone tracking is only one way of measuring print marketing performance! Print marketing can now merge seamlessly with the digital world. Including a QR code or website URL on your materials will allow customers to take your business into their own hands. QR codes are a fun and modern way to get interactions and have tracking built in. If you have one posted on a flyer, you can see how many times it was scanned through your end of the code. This gives you an easy way to see how many brochures were interacted with. It won’t be able to tell you how many times the flyer was looked at, but it will give you information on how many people cared enough to interact with it. Counting interactions against the number of flyers printed will provide you with an accurate measurement as to how useful your material was, and you can tweak your campaign off of that. 

A strong call to action is crucial to measuring print marketing performance. You do not want people just to see your marketing materials; you want them to care about it. If you have a custom URL listed for sale, you will be able to see how many people went shopping online because of that particular ad. This allows you to see how effective the ad was. Without a way for people to act on your company’s printed materials, you’ll never be able to see the return on investment. Your call to action does not need to be a literal ‘call now’ blurb, but make sure printed materials have some way for a customer to interact with your business. A call to action with quantifiable results, taken against how much you spent on the marketing, is the best way to measure print marketing performance. 

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