Hi there, My query is a little unusual - I hope someone can provide helpful comments. I work for an FMCG SME and we're thinking of hiring a proper digital marketing agency for the first time. The budget is steep for us and I'm trying to be as cautious as I can to ensure we actually get a good return on what we're spending. We're working on two strategies: - Offline sales strategy | - Online sales strategy What this means is, yes, we do have e-commerce (it hasn't been too big for us and we're planning on overhauling shop front, product pages, etc it's all WIP). But the majority of our sales come through offline channels (retail outlets). We do not own any retail outlets, we sell through major hyper and supermarkets that are absolutely unwilling to share customer data because of privacy laws. So here's my question - it's easy to measure the effectiveness of an online sales digital mktg strategy. But how would you measure whether your digital mktg efforts are working for offline sales in this situation? Since it can't be sales directly - what else could it be? How would you optmize for something like this? What are the KPI's we should track? This is seriously confusing for me. Just to give you an idea, right now, we'll work on an awareness campaign, we'll then move on to an engagement campaign and then conversion (basic stuff). A bit background on us - we're a milk company (for now). Organic dairy is our core. You can visit us at https://www.koita.com
I am reminded of a quote from the Marketing VP of Lotus Notes who had an advertising budget of $1MM to launch the application's sales many decades ago and well before the Internet existed: "I know that half of my advertising is working; I just do not know which half." It is really difficult to measure most advertising's impact on offline sales, no matter where said advertising is occurring. One approach might be to offer a special discount coupon to be used in stores (you would have to be willing to reimburse the retailer in the amount of the discount, of course) that would be a different code for every ad you place. By doing this, you are adding a way to gauge the effectiveness of the various media you are placing with and get an idea of business generated by the efforts. This is a very common practice for manufacturers selling through the retail channel and you should be able to easily get your retail outlets to agree as they surely process other coupons as part of their normal course of business. Otherwise, I am not aware of any meaningful ways to track the ROI for your efforts.
Thanks @jrbiz for the suggestion! I was thinking the same would have to be done, it's a little complicated but it's the only way I guess. Maybe in addition to sales we could measure "leads" or "quality social media followers" etc. as SOME form of easier measurement. What do you think?
The problem with "leads" or "social media followers" is the measurement of "quality", which you mention above. You can produce 1,000 "leads" or "followers" and none of them will ever buy from you. Certainly, leads or followers can be indicative of the success of a campaign at an early stage, but the only way to truly measure ROI is via actual sales, IMHO.
Another suggestion - I have looked at your website and it seems that your main products are milk boxes. You can have a printing on the box that encourage buyers to visit an online poll (either by URL or QR), where they are asked how they found out about your product/company (along with other questions of course). It can be an elegant way to segment your audience and build an email list as well. I personally know quite a few companies who use it for all of their porducts.