Using Digital Ads to Drive Offline Sales | Performance Delivered: Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success with Steffen Horst & Chris Madden

Using Digital Ads to Drive Offline Sales

In this episode, Chris Madden speaks with Steffen Horst from Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success podcast about how to use digital ads to drive brick-and-mortar sales. Chris shared his thoughts about this topic by differentiating e-commerce sales or online leads from store sales. He said that the main difference is the conversion you are going after, and where the conversion takes place. Clients could be aiming either to drive a sale or to turn a person into an interesting lead for their business, and that is what you drive with the ads. For online conversion, virtuous cycle of optimization can be very clean. When the conversion is offline, creativity is necessary to get real life conversion back to the digital ad platform.

To be able to get feedback from offline conversion to online platform and focus the client’s budget to what create the most impact, the first way is to do testing. Chris said, “In order to have the most impact, we have to try different things and have different ideas where we’re continually improving on whatever success is that we have built.”

For instance, Matchnode, with New Balance Chicago as their client, turned offline conversions to digital conversions through a manual process, which became to be too much of a disconnect. Even by running ads like offering promo codes for 15% discount on Facebook ads to drive people into the stores, it certainly takes days or even weeks for people to actually go to the store. Learning from that, Chris and his team created a digital conversion through a landing page after the ad which then enables a person to enter their email address in order to avail the promo code, and that helped them a lot in this work. There are more creative ways to create digital conversion in real life experiences, as Chris mentioned, like the QR codes which became more useful than ever when the pandemic happened, which helped businesses like restaurants to fire back offline conversions to the ad platform.

Steffen expressed that delay in response in regard to whether your activities drove an outcome is a main challenge for driving offline sales. Chris added that this challenge extends to the point you don’t understand how long that delay is. If that is the case, how long does it usually take to optimize campaigns for brick-and-mortar stores? How do you communicate that potentially longer time frame to the client? Chris explained that the communication about this should come during the very first conversations with the client. It is a matter of testing to identify how long the optimization would take place. Expectations must be set properly in the beginning.

The discussion went on further about industries where driving offline sales of brick-and-mortar sales from online activities works better. Restaurants, with the right point of sale system and integration with your database of customers, work nicely. As for retail businesses, you must be sure that the ads were performing as well and around the baseline. It all depends on the business, their situation, and even their choice of systems. Chris emphasized that systems choice is an important thing marketing leaders need to facilitate at businesses who want to try online to offline strategy. Secondly, expectation setting within the leadership throughout the business to understand how this works is also crucial. Lastly, it’s always important to consider how these different marketing channels work and integrate for your clients.

Matchnode as an advertising company exists to drive sales measured on ROI for clients. Impressions and awareness just come after that. The team works on short-term tasks consistently to establish a long-term connection with the clients. The nuanced understanding of attribution, how different channels are working together, and what’s really going on in the customer journey are so important to have because that is how Chris’ team at Matchnode are graded – when those numbers go very well and the relationship goes well, that’s how the business works. Matchnode helps a business achieve ROI either online or offline, leaning on what the business is selling and what they can afford to spend in their unit economics on advertising. Lifetime value on campaigns is significant as a strategic discussion in order to measure and attain ROI.

Resources:

• Performance Delivered: Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success Podcast by Steffen Horst
• Case Study: New Balance | Paid Social Ads to Drive Brick and Mortar Retail Sales
• Lifetime Value | Matchcast Episode 1