Do you measure your marketing success?

A fundamental part of marketing is to ‘test and measure’ the marketing strategies you employ to ensure you get the best return on investment for your marketing spend.

Most businesses are keen to ‘get more customers’ but seldom focus on the returns generated by the marketing activities undertaken.   Many advertising sales people (and they are trying to sell you something!) will push ‘raising awareness’ as a ‘goal’ for your business.

This is fine if it can be measured – otherwise you are probably wasting your money.

At Advice4Business we believe that your marketing efforts should focus on generating leads and that means you need to keep track of the marketing activities you do.

Now that raises an interesting question.

• How many distinct marketing activities do you engage in?

You probably need to use 10 or more separate marketing strategies and the measure how effective they are, this way you will learn what works best for your business and what strategies are less effective.

When you identify what works best, you can increase the activity.

For example, if you consistently generate good quality leads from your direct mailing campaigns, you could think about increasing  the volume of direct mailings you undertake?

For the less effective strategies, either change the way you do things – or stop wasting your time and money!

For instance, if you find that you are not generating any referrals from your networking activities, then start to think about what can you do to improve this?

Networking is a skill set that can be improved through good training.

Next ask yourself ‘why ’ to some of your marketing strategy’s.

For example, why do you have a website?

Is it to generate leads and if so, how effective is it?

Maybe your web strategy needs an overhaul if the returns are disappointing – and in truth, for most business owners this is the case.

Marketing is a key to business success – get it right and you’ll find customers beating a path to your door.