While many of my fellow B2B bloggers are covering the market issues, this blog focuses more on practice. If you know me, integrated B2B marketing is my area, where digital practice is always leading my thought. In my everyday business, I handle a lot of pitches for my clients. But almost every time when I talk about offline and online, the conversation will somehow lead into an antonymy of offline versus online.
I don’t know why we’ve developed a sentiment towards online and offline, both head to different directions against each other. Sometimes a discussion is even about comparing awareness to effectiveness. To me, as a marketer, I certainly have hard time to choose between eyeballs and conversion. We need both in every case.
Still quite many B2B marketers are comparing the effectiveness issue between trade magazines and Internet media. A lot of discussions on SOV but barely touch on other scientific metric. Most of the time the questions completely miss out the importance of integration, or I’d like to call it continuity.
How many times have you seen a print ad with proper measurable call-to-action? That is something we can measure when a magazine reader responds to a print ad over the web.
Why this is important? I can give you an example. When you read a print ad for a conference and the call-to-action says, “For more information and to register, go to <the conference website>,” we know clearly the conference organizer wants the readers to respond to the ad and then go online to file the registration. But without assigning a unique URL for that print ad, how can it be possible to measure if the readers have responded or not. In other words, how can you make sure your print ad has converted the eyeballs for you?
Don’t rely on your web analytics same as don’t trust the magazine’s circulation number. Because without setting up goals of conversion that enable tracking for different sources of visitors, the web analytics is simply a record of aggregated anonymous traffic.
Remember, today when you plan your integrated B2B marketing campaign, your web traffic is always about how people respond to you offline.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Thanks for visiting this weblog. I am a digital marketer based in Hong Kong. After founding a marketing consulting company, merged it with a trade show company, and completed my tenure in 2007, I am blogging my insight and commentary for marketing and entrepreneurial experience. Now I am the Managing Director of 
