Asking people where they heard about your business is not a tracking strategy. The data that you get from this kind of informal polling just isn’t that accurate or useful. Decades of mass-media advertising has led to the evolution of powerful defense mechanisms that enable consumers to tune-out most of the ad impressions delivered to them. In other words, they are ignoring your ads. At least they are trying to. It’s a survival instinct. If everyone paid attention to every bit of information flying at them each day, nothing would ever get done. As a result, if you ask a customer “how did you hear about us?” chances are that you will get a random or made-up answer.

Just because the informal polling method doesn’t work does not mean that you cannot effectively track your advertising. One of the easiest ways is to embed campaign-specific offers into your ad content. If you run a special financing deal exclusively on cable TV you can keep track of how many customers ask for it. Online is even easier. By creating a campaign-specific landing page you can measure results by monitoring the traffic to that page. Text messaging is another simple way to track response. It’s now very easy to have your customers send a text message to a specific number to get a coupon or subscribe to a mailing list.

If you do not already, start making embedded tracking mechanisms a part of every campaign you run. The examples above are just a few of the many ways you can do this. It can be a little uncomfortable in the beginning because it will highlight failure as well as it identifies success but the benefits are countless.

Advertising used to be about finding large groups of people congregating and then interrupting them with a message. Kind of like walking into the mall with a megaphone or the town crier standing on a box on Main Street. Many businesses still approach it that way and wonder why their ROI is dwindling. Things have changed.

From this point forward stop thinking about finding your customers and start thinking about making something worth finding. Your customers are already searching for your products. Make sure that your resources are being adequately allocated towards giving them something they will be thrilled with when they find it. Working this way turns your customers into your sales force. Your job is to be sales support. Give them something great to sell and they will not only find new customers for you, they will also do it in ways that are infinitely more efficient than anything you could accomplish with a ‘traditional’ advertising campaign.

Once you wrap your head around this concept it will become mush easier to figure out how to approach ‘new media’ such as blogs, social networks, and online communities. As an added benefit, you’ll also start to see new ways to incorporate traditional media to amplify your efforts.

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there about the role of offline media in an increasingly online world. Companies are busy creating MySpace pages, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, writing blogs, running search ads, banner ads, streaming ads etc. because they know that these tools are all part of the revolution that’s going on with online marketing. And all of this is healthy. You should be building, testing, and refining these things because tools like this will become the foundation of your marketing efforts (if they aren’t already). What you want to be careful of however, is becoming so enamored with ‘New’ media that you become completely averse to more traditional forms of advertising.

Being on TV just isn’t as sexy as it used to be is it? What about radio or the newspaper? Why would you even mess with these ancient technologies when everyone knows that the web is where it’s at?

The reason traditional media still makes sense is because there are still benefits to reaching large audiences. The difference now is that instead of trying to close the deal in :30 seconds with a TV spot, you use offline media as the front-end for your online presence. Instead of expecting people to see your commercial and then call up asking to buy something, use the reach of traditional media to drive people to your web assets. You will find that people are much more willing to log on to a website after seeing your commercial than they are to call you for an appointment or walk into your showroom. The other benefit of sending people to the web is that you build a reliable tracking mechanism into your campaign. By simply monitoring the traffic to a campaign-specific landing page you can quickly see what’s working and what isn’t.

It’s critical to be online, just don’t be myopic about it. Make sure you’re making good use of all the tools available to you (new and old) and you’ll get ahead faster.