Ad remarketing: How to connect your print and digital campaigns

The ability to track user engagement with digital ads has made it possible for marketers to more effectively nurture leads through highly relevant content and hyper-personalization. When users interact with an ad, link or landing page, their web experience adapts accordingly.

If a doctor visits a pharmaceutical manufacturer's website and downloads a pamphlet on prescribing information, he or she may receive an email about that product a few hours later. This is an example of remarketing, which can be a productive strategy for recapturing leads that may require additional interactions before converting to a customer.

An essential component of any remarketing strategy is the ability to track user engagement across channels. B2B marketers often achieve this by using customer relationship management tools to understand how leads find and interact with digital collateral across the web.

But how do marketers track offline campaigns? Monitoring site traffic driven from print sources can be a challenge, but it is possible to determine which offline ads actually propel qualified leads further down the sales funnel.

Analyzing traffic to branded links and landing pages can show marketers which ads are most engaging.

Tracking offline campaigns

Often, brands will promote their main domain address or a specific hashtag within a printed ad. While doing so will certainly drive traffic to the site, it doesn't tell the marketers much about how the ad appealed to relevant reader - or if the people who came to the site from the print ads were relevant at all.

The challenge is to understand how specific ads drive traffic. Does one version of ad copy work better than others? Do direct mail materials have a better engagement rate than billboards or magazines?

Unique links

These questions can be answered using customized URLs. For example, an ad appearing in The American Journal of Medicine may feature a link like pharmabrand.link/AJM. Meanwhile a pamphlet distributed at the Medical Design and Manufacturing Conference may include the link pharmabrand.link/MDMCon. This way, marketers can easily identify how their print campaigns connect with their direct site traffic.

Keep in mind that these URLs may continue to circulate long after the original campaign ends. To maintain the value of printed links, marketers can redirect that traffic to a static landing page or a new promotion.

Unique landing pages

Unique links can either drive traffic to a single landing page, or to customized landing pages. For instance, some brands may only need a single page to deliver a specific message. However other brands may want to create different pages for HCPs and patients. If some of the information on the two pages overlaps, Google may flag that content as duplicate, which could skew your analytics report as you attempt to determine the effectiveness of offline ads.

To avoid this conundrum, simply add a noindex meta tag to the page containing duplicate content. It looks like this: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. These pages won't appear in organic search, so can be sure the traffic coming to them is from your offline campaign.

Phone and direct mail

People coming to your brand from offline channels may not want to move into a digital channel to learn more about your products and services. Rather than losing these potentially valuable customers, add a phone number to your ads. Doing so can help customers convert when they'd rather speak with a person.

Any of the above tactics can be leveraged in a direct mail campaign, as well. You'll always have a mix of customers who prefer receiving information within different channels. In fact, it may take several conversations spanning multiple channels to close a sale.

To learn more about how Elsevier can support your multichannel marketing campaigns, contact one of our trusted consultants today.