How to Measure Your Marketing Efforts
Trade shows, networking events, conferences, webinars, advertisement, marketing materials and PR campaigns. What do they have in common? They are all marketing activities and all cost money.
How do you know what you are getting in return? How can we justify the costs of our marketing efforts and back it up with solid data instead of guesswork? Many companies don’t have answers to these questions.
And that’s a big mistake. While marketing can be for the most part trial and error, you need to know when you are making these errors. Without analysis, it is impossible.
It’s vital to develop a consistent plan and marketing strategy that will help you project, measure and evaluate your marketing campaigns. Without it, you are simply going about marketing blindly. This is one of the most costly mistakes in business.
Here are the ingredients for a successful marketing campaign:
- Quantitive and Qualitative goals
Your marketing campaign can be either quantitative or qualitative. Qualitative is about customer perception, positioning of your brand in the marketplace, brand awareness, improvement of the standard of your products/services. In order to measure these, surveys and interviews are required, as they are more in-depth.
Quantitative is all about numbers. How many people turned up for the launch of the newest product, how many people attended the event, etc. Much more straightforward.
- Campaign budget
How much will you spend in order to achieve the qualitative and quantitative objectives you have set? What is your desired result when it comes to the budget? How much of it you actually want to spend?
- Follow-up Strategy
At the end of every marketing campaigns there has to be a list of actions. The campaign itself is all expenses. You are paying for information, exposure, and feedback. It has to result in something that will provide you with a return on investment. The most shocking thing is that a lot of businesses adapt an ad-hoc approach and don’t have a plan, letting the whole thing unravel by itself. Often, this results in a sense of disappointment and a false belief that the campaign “just didn’t work”. Always have a follow-up strategy.
- Tracking and testing
Similar to measuring your results, tracking and testing is incredibly important, especially when experimenting with new marketing techniques and trying to enter new markets. Trying new things is a very healthy marketing technique, but it needs to be monitored closely and changes to what is not working to be taken timely and swiftly.
There are a lot of reasons why a marketing campaign might flag and fail, but the truth is – most of the time it is because of us. As soon as you stop looking at the outside factors and concentrate on your own execution process, you will find yourself to be much more successful at marketing than you ever did.