Make sure you measure up!

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing. This is a crucial part of a successful marketing campaign, and often one which is overlooked.

The key method of gauging the effectiveness of your marketing is simple – talk to your customers!

Make it a central part of your business practices to find out how each customer found out about your business. Track the source of all your enquiries, from a simple phone query through to a sale. It doesn’t need to be complex, a simple check list at the counter can be an effective tool to capture this information.

Effectively recording the collected data is also a key priority. Being able to easily review and analyse this data on a regular basis helps you understand how the money you are spending on marketing impacts on your business. This simple strategy can effectively save you thousands in wasted marketing spend each year.

A key example is your Yellow Pages advertising. If you advertise in three different sections each year and find from tracking your enquiries that one of these sections gives you less than 10% response rate, you can then make some firm decisions based on this data. You may decide not to advertise in this section the next year, or to increase the size of your advert in this section. Whichever decision you make, the key is that you’ll be making it based on fact rather than intuition.

“This article was written by Tracy-Madonna Wylie, Business Manager, Nutbirdz Strategic Marketing, and printed in the My Marketing Companion column of the Fraser Coast Chronicle in 2007.”