Advertising

There are different advertising means that can be used today but one thing is for sure: you can never be considered a part of the business world if you do not market or promote your products and services. Advertisement has become a tradition already for companies. This is because this is one of the most effective ways to reach out to the public and let them know that your product or company exists. However, not all ads are effective. There are some wherein a company will spend a lot of money and yet customers still do not even buy their products. But there is no need to worry because this is all part of the business world. Risks are always present and you are not really guaranteed that your marketing or advertisement campaign will work no matter how much money you spend. So what are the easy ways on how to measure advertising effectiveness?

Before that, you are well aware of the fact that ads can be seen almost anywhere. When you turn on your TV, you can see them through commercials. Radio stations also have them and when you go outside, you will find posters and billboards everywhere. Of course, the Internet is also one of the places where you can view them and there is simply no shortage of them on the web. There are different techniques on how to measure advertising success and they usually depend on the means you have chosen. For instance, when you have produced an ad for TV, the method for measuring its efficiency is different for the evaluation in success for the commercial on the web.

In general, there are three ways on how to measure advertising effectiveness. They are done by means of surveys. The only difference is that the questions that are asked in the inquiries. The first one is through recognition measure. Here, one of the main questions is whether the person knows about the ad that you or your company has presented. If his or her answer is “yes” then you can view it as an effective commercial because that individual knows about your product already. But of course, there are other people that you can ask and there are some of them who might answer that they do not have any clue as to what your ad is about.

The next is aided awareness wherein the person will select from the list of questions about which among them are the ones that he or she would like to answer. Being able to pick the vital issues here is clearly necessary. Therefore you should only include the matters that you want to know about with regards to the reaction of the person on the promotion that you have set up. The last one is the opposite which is unaided awareness. The most common question here is whether they know a single sponsor for that certain ad. You can also inquire here if they know the company that is responsible for the commercial. When you have collected the data and analyzed the results, you will be able to measure advertisement effectiveness easily.

A comment usually attributed to Lord Leverhulme went something like, “I know that half of my marketing spend is wasted, but I’m not sure which half.”

Whether they know it or not, this is this situation most companies are in today, I would go further and say 80% of your prospects come from 20% of your marketing but which 20%? Leverhulme didn’t have the advantage of the Internet back in the 20s but you now have some big advantages.

Imagine being able to cut out the wasted spend and do more of what is working! It isn’t difficult it just needs a simple database, better use of your web site and maybe a little planning.

Whether it is paying £20 per month to put a business card in the local store, a yellow pages advert or a piece in the local/national press; you need to know whether it is worth doing. When it comes to more expensive advertising then you really need to know how many leads you are getting for your money and how many of those are converting to sales. If you use pay-per-click and have multiple adverts running then maybe we can show you how to track the exact success of each one.

If the ‘Call To Action’ of your advertising is to call you then you need to ask where people found your details or have a separate number for each campaign if that is practical for you. You need to do this every time and you need to record the results. Whether on paper or on computer you need to track every prospect:

Name
Contact details
Product/service they are interested in
Likely buying timescale
Where they heard about you
Core product/service bought
What additional products/services have they been offer

That is the bare minimum and you will have to add to this for your own business purposes but without this core data you are doomed to continue wasting a large portion of your marketing budget.

If you have a web site then you can get clever. If you don’t have a web site then go get one, now! Seriously, you can have a web site for around £20 plus the time and effort of setting it up. There is enough information freely available to allow you to create a compelling web experience for your customers and get the message out there that you exist. If you know nothing about the internet and can’t afford to get a third party to do the development for you then choose a web host that offers one of the easy web creators.

Every piece of advertising you do will have a web site address (URL) on it so that people can go to your web site to find out more about what you have to offer. The vast majority of companies drive people to their home page and in doing so most of them lose valuable information on where the visitor came from. If you are getting links to your site from other places on the internet then it is possible to include information in those links to track where they came from. If you don’t have the knowledge to do this then simple create a new web page for each advert and have people reading that advert go to that unique page.

After a while you can see through your web statistics how many people arrive at these unique pages. An easy way of judging the success rates of all your advertising. Go back and read that part again and then make a note to do it. This is a free way of measuring marketing success and one of the easiest to implement. It is more than that though, it allows you to customize each landing page to the advert that brought people in, it allows you to test different landing pages to see which ones give the best conversion rates. Never forget the bottom line, you are trying to get people to spend their money in your direction.

Then you can stop paying for the adverts that are not bringing in visitors, adjust the ones where the conversion rates are low and do more like the ones that are working for you.

Needless to say that advertising plays a major role in the running of any business. And as time goes on, there has been a trend where marketing and advertising is aspects which are getting more and more aggressive, needless to say, innovative. The key however to effective marketing and advertising is to be subtle. Yes, that’s right. Once a marketer comes across as desperate to sell his products, the whole purpose of advertising gets lost.

The latest trend that has emerged in advertising is to keep a track of your customers. This not only forms a basis for study and analysis of your marketing policies, but it also lets the businessman plan his strategy according to the results that emerge out of this exercise.

The exercise is simple. Let us take the example of a grocery store or a super market. They have these key tags that they want their customers to sign up for. By doing so the customers can avail some discount on the products they purchase. In return, the customer, by filling up the form, gives his detail to the grocer, enabling him to monitor his purchases each time he swipes that key tag. This does not amount to a great increase in sales for the grocer. But he still wishes customers would sign those tags and cards.

This is because he wants to keep a track of the shopping habits of his customers. Shoppers follow a certain behavioral pattern. Some shoppers prefer spinach over radish, for example. Some prefer to shop on Mondays rather than on Thursdays. Some even prefer to shop for certain things in small quantities while the others in bulk. These are the little things that the grocers are trying to track.

Once they figure out these behavioral patterns, they can tailor their advertising and marketing strategies to their customers’ habits and make the products more appealing to them. As your business continues to mature, the amount of data that you have about your customers buying habits will increase and allow you to tailor your advertising and purchasing decisions to closely match your customers.

Therefore, for someone who is looking to starting a small business at some point in the near future, there is much lesson to be learnt from the neighborhood grocer. The phrase “Know Your Customer” may be a cliché, but it is certainly not an over rated aspect of marketing. In fact, the very knowledge of your customers’ habits leads you to formulate your marketing plans accordingly. This is a part of your market research. Along with the economic and industry conditions it is equally important that the customers are also included in your background research if you wish to effectively sell your product.

Without proper tracking of customer data, it is a given that you will spend parts of your advertising and marketing budgets unnecessarily and still search for greater returns that could have been made possible already. Tracking is a function of advertising that is often overlooked, but pays for itself many times over with the quality of data you are able to gain about your customers buying decisions.