Summer time and I love to barbecue but I gotta tell you, it doesn’t necessarily come natural to me. I’m always freaked that I’ll over or under cook whatever it is that I’ve got on the grill and I’m always pleasantly surprised when something edible results.
That’s why when I was listening to the radio this morning my ears perked up when I heard a guy talking about how to grill the perfect hamburger. As it turns out it was an ad for Weber Grills that ended with an invitation to go to their web site for even more recipes and, hey, while I’m there, I should tune into some of the testimonials from satisfied customers.
Did I go to their site? You bet! This is called ‘closing the loop‘. It’s when you tie a piece of offline marketing to an online fulfillment mechanism allowing you to track with a great degree of accuracy the outcome of that marketing effort. Its ROI. It’s the same approach infomercials use when they flash an 800 number on screen and exhort you to call now … except without the pesky sales pitch.
What’s great about this approach is that it works on multiple levels. Even if I didn’t go to their site, I was still captured by the ad because it was giving me something of value and interest to me. It then went on to entice me to take further action – go to their website – with an offer of further value. It would be kind of like a TV commercial doing such a great job of promoting a product that you agree to watch another commercial (Oh yeah, that’s what Apple’s doing with their current TV campaign). It’s a beautiful thing. Finally, by tying a hard to measure marketing medium – the radio ad – to an easy to measure marketing medium – a website – Weber is able to better quantify the impact of their marketing. And, after all, don’t most of us wonder if we’re just pumping our promotional dollars into a bottomless pit?
The only thing Weber didn’t do right, in my opinion, was tie their radio promotion to a campaign specific landing page. If they’d done this they’d have injected an even greater level of granularity to their campaign results. On the recipe page though they do another thing right … offering a recipe of the week email newsletter. Again, they’re capturing prospects with value enabling them to continue to expose them to their message – Buy a Weber Grill – in a way that prospects welcome rather than run from.
Think about your business. How can you ‘close the loop’ in your marketing and advertising campaigns. When you do, remember, “Value begets Value.”
