Digital is the new buzz word within the marketing industry.  Clients are demanding digital campaigns to communicate with their ever more technologically savvy consumers.  But what exactly drives people to the mouse, rather than the phone to get in touch with a brand?  Ben Allan at TILT argues that the industry needs to recognise the place offline media has in online response.    

 There is a current worrying trend within the marketing industry of allocating entire budgets on digital marketing and subsequently pulling all investment from alternative direct channels. And I say worrying because this shift appears to be happening without any consideration to what actually drives online traffic.  

Direct mail still has a bright future despite the reports condemning it, as there is proof that a well targeted campaign is one of the most effective drivers to increase online traffic and generate sales. But because it is difficult to attribute hits on a website back to offline advertising, the online channel reaps all the glory.     

We wanted a fistful of hard evidence to prove this so created an insurance broker brand ‘Quote Genie’ which acted as a placebo for the research project. Quote Genie had no prior legacy that would affect response analysis.  We positioned the brand as an online insurance broker providing a wide range of home, travel and motor insurance quotes and advertised it in our consumer guide asrecommended Insurance (delivered via Royal Mail addressed mail), which was distributed to 600,000 prospects in January 2008.  

Consumers were directed to a dedicated website www.quotegenie.co.uk where the number of unique users was recorded. In addition to this all calls were routed and recorded by a call lead manager.  

The results were surprising given the fact that there was no supporting online marketing, PR or additional direct marketing!  In total, over 2,000 consumers responded and of that 41% were directed to the website.   

What Quote Genie showed was that a considerable volume of online consumers are influenced by offline media.  So as offline investment continues to fall, will we see is a drop in online traffic? Will the industry wait for this to happen before the underlying connection is made? Clearly what this research has shown is that there needs to be a re-balance between direct and digital. I don’t dispute that digital is the future, 1.4 billion consumers online is a figure that cannot be ignored, but there is still a place for offline and it deserves recognition for its effectiveness and part in making online such a success. 

We’re seeing more and more consumers preferring to communicate online rather than other channel regardless of where they are influenced by a brands’ message.  At the end of the day we need to start investing in effective ways of measuring sales and what drives them, rather than carrying on making flawed marketing spend decisions.   

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