Exposure, Immersion, and Conversion
Marketing and advertising execs often talk about reach, frequency, and conversion rates with respect to budgets and ROI. It is common practice to plan for at least 7 touches, or exposures (some industries place this as high as 14) before a new prospect becomes a paying customer.
There is a tremendous amount of pressure to justify marketing and ad spend, especially in a tough economy. Because most marketing execs can’t measure offline effectively, that pressure pushes them towards online marketing, where they can measure more clearly.
Interestingly enough, this shift from offline to online doesn’t necessarily improve bottom line results… in fact, it sometimes has just the opposite effect. But, since it is the only area many marketers feel they can measure and justify, they stick with it.
It is my opinion that effective advertising and marketing has to be a hybrid mix of offline and online, not one or the other. How that mixture is represented in your budget must be a factor of the industry you are in, who your target customers are, and how you can best tell your story.
But how can you justify the investment in a form that you can’t measure? That is the problem that O-CODES seeks to solve.
O-CODES is about immersion and conversion.
O-CODES immerse consumers deeper into your brand experience, your content, at the initial point of exposure. Consumers can interact and engage with your offline content using a mobile phone and simple text messages. O-CODES make it very simple for them to take immediate action, to convert to a paying customer or loyal follower, and to share your content via their social networks.
This also allows for the effectiveness of your offline advertising and marketing to be measurable, in great detail. If you have a campaign that spans multiple offline channels (transport ads, outdoor ads, TV commercials, radio spots, and direct mail, for instance), using unique O-CODES in each channel (and even in different zoned areas within each of those channels) you would be able to track consumer engagement related to your brand in each area. You could test slightly different messages as well as different times or geographic locations to see which ones produce the best results.
Offline channels are still brilliant and effective with respect to their simplicity and ability to quickly expose a captive audience to your brand, message, or story. Where offline falls short is immersion. Most offline channels are quick blasts of short exposure snippets (thus the requirement for multiple exposures before a prospect becomes a customer). O-CODES changes this, by allowing consumers to become immersed into your brand experience quickly and easily (using their mobile phone) at the moment of initial exposure. Print and TV and radio ads create that first attraction or interest, which can be followed up instantly with video, audio, product demos, infographics, pictures, and links to special offers or promotions – instantly and right in the consumer’s hand.
The gap between initial exposure / first impressions is closed more quickly, and exposure becomes instant immersion which leads to quicker conversion. Prospects become customers in an instant, with the ability to get enough information about your product or service to make a decision, and make a purchase, all in the palm of their hand.
In addition, O-CODES enables the reach of your message to be amplified via social networks. Consumers can share your content to their Facebook wall, their Twitter stream, and into shared Evernote notebooks instantly without any special applications…just a simple text message. Your offline content and messaging becomes social, viral, and interactive.
This is all measurable. The path from point of exposure, to immersion, to conversion is trackable. And the marketing and advertising budget decisions are justifiable and clear.
The future (at least in my lifetime) is not ALL digital. It is a hybrid mix between offline and online content, each with advantages and value. Knowing how to use the mix to maximize the value of your content is the secret to success.
