Hi everyone! This is Takashi at Web Analytics Consultants Association.

 

Despite all the interesting new ways companies are embracing digital in their business and in their marketing, Google’s marketing efforts at the event managed to stand out using surprisingly traditional mediums – a free notepad.

It comes to show that even a brochure can be a powerful tool for a digital marketer. In Google’s case, they were able to combine an offline medium with their online marketing by having excellent communication design.

The notepad

I don’t remember why I picked up this notepad. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have thought that Google would definitely take offline marketing seriously.

And they did. Allow me to go into detail.

Physical Design

Even at a quick glance, it was something that stood out because the actual size is not very common in Japan. The notepad itself was pretty solid and looked like it would be good for business meetings or at least taking notes in the Tech in Asia event.

So immediately, it was an item that differentiated and provided value.

CTA on every page

Right from the first few pages, Google placed a questionnaire asking various questions about businesses. Obviously, this was an attempt to better sell AdWords to SMEs and startups, which is fine. I was after all at an event geared towards this type of sales pitches so the being a bit aggressive here fit well.

The notepad also had free post cards to send directly to Google’s business support team, which they will then use to follow-up with you on the phone.

By placing a customer URL on the notepad, they were able to keep track of how many online sessions came from their notepad.

FYI, you can make a custom URL with parameters to track different traffic sources from this URL. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Communication design for digital marketers

What we just saw here with Google is a great example of communication design. Simply put, communication design refers to the way in which you reach out to customers by taking their entire customer journey into consideration.

Since the purpose of web consulting is to optimize businesses, not just websites, communication design is essential when planning a market strategy.

The picture above shows an example of communication design we use in our courses.

In the example, the music school is using communication design to establish better online/offline connections with the music school. I omitted the detailed explanations from the image to simplify things a bit but the important thing to keep in mind are the “touch points” in a customers’ journey.