Article

5 ways iPad kiosks can amplify your offline marketing

Through the use of the right technology, it is possible to stay data-driven when marketing offline.

January 29, 2014

by Adam Aronson

CEO, lilitab

The beauty of online marketing is that it's (relatively) straightforward to measure. But the world's smartest marketers know that brick-and-mortar is far from obsolete. As much as we love to reach consumers online, we also know that it's important to connect with them in person — after all, we're human, and we're never going to give up our grocery stores, retail adventures, food festivals and conferences.

Offline marketing is crucial for reaching customers. Major consumer brands have relied on print media and word-of-mouth marketing for more than a century. In fact, as of 2012, 82 percent of global ad spend was still offline. That trend is only slowly changing — digital was only 20 percent of global ad spend in 2013.

The problem is that digital marketing has spoiled us. We know exactly how much we can afford to invest in our Facebook ads or content marketing programs. At any given moment, we have access to a wealth of analytics tools. It takes 5 minutes to install Google Analytics and set up conversion tracking. Using UTM tracking codes, we can attribute every user engagement activity to a specific marketing channel or traffic source.

Setting up a booth at a tradeshow, however, can feel like we're throwing darts in the dark. We simply can't track shoppers at the same level of precision. We need to think on our feet and approach tracking more creatively. Mobile technology makes this vision a reality for us. When we market offline, we can absolutely stay data-driven.

iPad kiosks can help us collect consumer data to prioritize numbers over intuition. Here are five ideas to inspire you:

1. Create an event survey

Whether you're hosting a class, speech, seminar, or conference, you can use iPad kiosks to set up quick, easy, and efficient customer feedback centers.

Not a survey methodology expert? No problem.

You don't need to design your own survey. In fact, there are apps that can help you choose the right questions, organize results, visualize trends, and export data. TabbleDabble is one startup that is building a survey tool for mobile devices.

2. Measure direct traffic to your website

This type of web traffic is called 'type-in' data. When people visit your website directly, it's a sign that you've become memorable — presumably, as a result of your various branding initiatives.

Look for trends over time, and look for traffic spikes that correlate with campaigns that your company has run offline. For instance, if you recently hosted an event and asked attendees to check out your website, you can monitor type-in traffic in the following days.

You can use charts and graphs to visualize correlations between marketing activities and dips/spikes in traffic. If you're a stats nerd, you can calculate something called a Pearson Correlation Coefficient to look for relationships web traffic, foot traffic and offline marketing spend.

Here's a tip for you. If you're hosting an event, and you want people to visit your website, you'll need them to take action immediately. You can set-up iPad kiosks in high-foot traffic areas so that people can visit your website during brain-breaks. In that case, you'll want to monitor dips and spikes in traffic during the event as well as before and after.

3. Create memorable offers

This tactic is especially useful for e-commerce companies (or anybody who sells a productized online service).

If you're running any offline marketing campaigns, you can incorporate coupon codes that are dead-easy for people to remember. You can even change-up the coupon codes to track whether you're earning sustainable repeat business.

Use your analytics or business intelligence software to track how many people are using the coupon code you advertised. It's that easy.

Coupon codes can also be made part of your event, conference, or brick-and-mortar storefront. Set-up an iPad kiosk so that people can enter the code right then and there. Include a "hint" for the coupon code to help people remember it at checkout — but don't tell them what it is. If you give too much away, you won't have the data to track word of mouth.

One tip is to make this process a fun game so that people are incentivized to use the coupon code or follow-through with the transaction. The easier (and more immediate) you make the checkout process, the more empowered you'll be to ramp up conversions.

4. Create custom landing pages

These are landing pages created specifically for your offline campaigns. Keep the URLs very, very short using redirect URLS. Just like your coupon codes, these URLs need to be short and over-the-top easy to remember. Your company can even consider buying a custom domain name. Just make sure to add a no-index meta tag so that Google doesn't crawl the page for ranking in search.

As with your coupon codes, you can maximize conversion opportunities using iPad kiosks. If iPad kiosks are integrated as part of your museum, store, event, or display, you can make these pages immediately accessible and interactive: again, like a fun game. If people are empowered to take action on your advertising calls to action (CTAs) immediately, you'll see a boost in user engagement activity.

Tip: When you design your landing pages, make sure that you choose a responsive design. Consider using a platform like Unbounce to make this process incredibly easy.

5. Track Phone Calls to Your Company

With offline marketing, the most important CTA may be a phone call rather than a visit to your company's website. You'll want to see how many calls you're getting and where they might be coming from.

The challenge with monitoring this metric is that there is a huge black box. But, you can still benchmark progress by paying attention to the following:

• Calculate how many calls are coming in through online channels. You can use the Goals feature in Google Analytics to see how many people are clicking through to the 'contact us' page on your website. If you're running a mobile SEM campaign with Google's click-to-call feature as a conversion goal, you can calculate a number there.
• Calculate a differential between the total number of calls you're getting and the ones that you know are coming from your website.
• Think about how many calls are coming through indirect channels (i.e., people who visit your website and then call you later). This might be a rough approximation but still — make an educated guess, and stick to it.
• Once you've gone through the due diligence of steps 1 through 4, start looking at correlations between offline marketing pushes and call volume. By monitoring this general trend, you'll start to get a feel for which initiatives are working.

IPad kiosks can help you amplify call conversions. If you're hosting an event, you can ask audiences to follow up with a call — right then and there. You can even create a unique phone number to track calls from that specific event. Having an iPad kiosk will simplify the process of putting consumers in touch with your company.

Keep in mind that your analytic strategy here will be a rough approximation. Don't fixate on the details. Marketers today are obsessed with precise attribution — which is important, but here's the thing:

It will never be perfect.

Make sure that you're looking at marketing activity (and ROI) holistically, too. This approach will be crucial when you're measuring CTAs as phone calls to your company.

Adam Aronson is the CEO of lilitab, an interactive kiosk company focused on the use of tablet computers in public environments. Aronson adapted this commentary from a recent lilitab guide titled, "The Ultimate Guide to Bridging Online and Offline Marketing: iPad Kiosk Edition."