Why you need a URL in your offline advertising.
Imagine you’ve just shelled out x-thousand dollars for a 30-second TV spot that will run in prime time for the next three weeks or a full-page, full-color spread that will be published in the New York Times on Saturday. You’re crossing your fingers that you’ll get a good ROI, because your boss is breathing down your neck.
I sure hope that you included a URL in your ad.
Whether you like it or not, potential customers who watch/read your ad will go looking for you online. Are you making it easy for them to do that?
In a research study that we recently did for one of our clients, we showed participants a TV commercial. In an overlay at the bottom of the frame, each participant saw one of three things:
- The company name (no call to action)
- A phone number
- A vanity URL
After watching the commercial, we asked each participant what they’d do to follow up (they were allowed to pick more than one activity).
Visiting the website and searching for the company were the top two activities, regardless of the call to action.
Hang on a second, you say. According to that chart, participants were more likely to visit the website when there was no call to action. Good point.
Except that when we asked them what website they’d visit, they told us the wrong one. The client was using a vanity URL that the participants couldn’t remember or guess – instead, they guessed at a URL that would have ended up taking them to the site’s homepage, where there was no information relevant to the commercial. If they’re looking for you online, wouldn’t you like them to find the information they’re looking for?
This led us to recommend that the client:
- Use URLs and a phone number in their commercials
- Use folders in their URLs (www.company.com/promo) rather than vanity URLs (www.buyfromcompany.com)
- Reinforce the call to action by including “call 1-800-555-1234 or visit company.com/promo” in the commercial voice over
So now that we’ve established that your potential customers are going to try and find you online, let’s take a look at how many of you are actually making that easy for them to do.
A recent study from Nominet looked at the use of URLs in print and TV advertising in the UK. The UK is pretty sophisticated when it comes to online stuff.
Only two thirds of print and TV advertising had a URL. When you break that apart, 83% of newspaper advertising had a URL, while only 61% of TV advertising did. In an analysis that looked at £40 million worth of advertising, that means that tens of millions of British pounds of advertising maybe aren’t being used as effectively as they could be.
Are you throwing money away by not including a URL in your advertising?
Do you use URLs in your offline advertising? Why or why not? Let us know what you think by commenting below.
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Thanks for the article. While online advertising has risen in importance, a truly effective marketing campaign needs just as you suggest – an effective link from the offline marketing to the online marketing.
Thanks for the comment, Chris.
Linking online and offline is one of the biggest struggles we see a lot of companies dealing with today. Typically, we’re looking at companies that had a “traditional” marketing department (print, TV, radio, etc.), and were forced to create an “online” marketing department 5 or 10 years ago to throw together a website, maybe do a little bit of online advertising, and so on.
The problem today is that the customers of these companies don’t see marketing silos. They see one company, with fragmented and often confusing marketing messages.
Even if the company wants/needs to stick with the marketing silos, making sure that they’re aware of what the other one is up to and doing their best to create continuity between marketing channels is key.
Recently heard a BOSE radio spot for a complex but innovative new product. The call to action? Visit a store. Ouch!
Why not a simple URL with a YouTube video?
Jeff
Thanks for the comment, Jeff! Definitely agree with you, although I think the in-store thing is part of the Bose business model (they suck you in with beautiful home theatre set ups then upsell you til the cows come home… plus, how can you truly experience Bose sound over YouTube?).
Another important point is that your URLs have to be memorable. I don’t know what the Bose one on the radio would have been, but there’s been one playing here in South Western Ontario for a couple of weeks for a place called Domain of Killien. If you say “domainofkillien.com” out loud, I suspect you could envision about 12 different spellings of Killien… Kilian, Chillian, Qilien… you get my point. It took me about 5 times hearing it as I was driving along the highway at 100 km/h to actually understand that it was something that sounded like Killien, and then I had to Google it to actually find it. Not great…
This is an excellent post, and it probably supports the need to ensure that website landing pages – and all web pages – are named properly in web analytics tools. Dennis Mortensen’s book, Yahoo! Web Analytics, mentions the importance of ensuring that landing page HTML title tags are not relied upon for web analytics reporting purposes – which would skew analytical results of TV/Radio ad campaigns that incorporate website URLs in them.
Thanks for the comment, Tom. You’re absolutely right, there’s not much point in setting up campaign-specific URLs and so on if you can’t monitor them.