If this article doesn’t help you solve your issues with measuring marketing effectiveness, then make sure you contact us for a free consultation.

Have you ever heard of Guerrilla Marketing? It’s an effective way of marketing execution for mostly small businesses but its techniques can be applied in huge corporations as well.

One of  its 15 main rules according to the founder Jay Conrad Levinson sounds as follows:

“You can actually double your profits by measuring the results of your marketing. Some weapons hit bullseyes. Others miss the target. Unless you measure, you won’t know which are which.“

So do you know how effective is your your marketing? Which is the half of the marketing costs which you spend uselessly? How much of what you spend on marketing is actually effective?

How many sales a given campaign generates? Are the sales team happy with the quality of leads that marketing supplies?

If you don’t know answers to these questions, you don’t know how much revenue you are leaving on the table.

Therefore, you now probably need the following:

  • An understanding of what actually worked and what was a waste of money
  • A benchmark for success, showing you where you could have got value for money
  • An idea of where to focus your future marketing budget to get results and what you should be looking at when creating your next marketing plan

How Can You Track All Your Campaigns Easily

Remember how you were planning your campaigns maybe at the beginning of this year? At the end, we will need to check whether you stuck with the plan and how well you did with the individual campaigns.

Here is a clear description of what you should measure:

  • Campaign Start – When did the campaign start?
  • Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
  • Actual # Leads – How many leads did you actually get so far?
  • Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
  • Actual # Sales – How many sales did you actually get so far?
  • Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
  • Actual Sales Value – How much sales did the campaign generate so far?
  • Expected Budget – What is your budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?
  • Actual Budget – How much did you spend so far on the campaign?
  • Return on Investment – How much sales did $1 of actual budget generate?

Make sure you keep record of these values for each campaign, so that you can compare their effectiveness year-to-year.

Six Killer Tips to Boost Your Advertising Effectiveness

If you measure advertising effectiveness on a regular basis, you will soon get the idea of what is working and what is not. However, if you are just starting with your campaigns, the following tips might come in handy.

1.    Setting Goals and Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Before you dive deeper into ad creation and all that fun part of your marketing, always make sure you set goals for the individual campaigns first, so that you can measure the effect of any activity and see how it worked. In future, you will then be able to make a qualified decision whether to repeat it or not.

2.    Aiming at the Right Target Market

For advertising to be effective it needs to be directly targeted at people who will respond to the advert with an action that will eventually lead to a sale. Do not listen to sellers of ad space who argue that if you take an advert out on the radio there is a good chance your buyers might hear it. We can guarantee that 99.9% of people hearing your ads will not be interested.

Therefore, be very keen at planning your marketing forward and to deciding yourself where you will be investing your advertising budget – remember your watering holes?

3.    Powerful Content

Another thing to always remember is that “Content is King” which means the content of all your marketing collateral must provide solutions to customers’ problems and/or respond strongly to their desires.

So how can you make sure that when customers get to any of your marketing materials, they will find what they are looking for?

  1. Speak the language of customers
  2. Impress them with messages they relate to
  3. Use a clear “Call to Action” – tell them what to do next – clearly!
  4. Use testimonials from real customers wherever you can

4.    Appropriate Structure

There is a special 4mat you should use for all your marketing materials. By answering these 4 questions in this specific order, you will be able to attract the most of customers:

  • Why? Give them a reason to read more/contact you etc.
  • What? Tell them what the benefits of your products are.
  • How? Explain clearly how they can get the benefits.
  • What..if? Show them what happens/does not happen if they contact you now.

If you manage to merge all these using a bit of creativity, you will create a marketing piece that will not only attract customers, but they will start to really want to buy your products!

5.    Enticing Graphic Design

Unless you are a professional graphic designer yourself, it is always a good idea to have these items (or at least the most important ones) designed by a creative professional who will make sure that the colours match well; they will pick a combination of fonts that best reflect your company’s style, and give you lots of creative ideas you can then use effectively – don’t worry, these services don’t need to be as expensive as they might seem at the first sight.

6.    Killer Headline

your business owners quite often ask themselves, “Why do I get no responses from my adverts?” Some of the responses you would get from a marketing expert might include the following;

  • Your ad was too small!
  • You should have used colour!
  • You needed a better design to show it off!
  • Your logo is wrong!
  • Too much copy!
  • Too little copy!
  • Call to action was not clear enough!
  • Etc.

They could all be right, and most of them could have helped somewhat. But the real thing that pulls a response, once you are addressing the correct target market is the headline!

Now, that you have all the theoretical knowledge about the “how-to”, make sure you go forth and implement all these wonderful ideas.

3R offers a service of Marketing Effectiveness Feedback as part of the Monitoring Phase of 3RTM Success Framework. If this article didn’t help you solve your issues with measuring marketing effectiveness, then make sure you contact us for a free consultation.

So if you would like to learn more and discuss your own particular situation, whatever business you are in, give us a shout on phone-number or register for a free business health check – maybe we can help you.

This article was written by Simona Rusnakova and Peter Lawless from 3R Sales and Marketing– www.3r.ie. For previous articles like this, visit 3R’s Articles. Alternatively, subscribe to Success our free monthly Information Bulletin with sales and marketing articles.