How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing
Every business wants to know if their marketing worked and how to to invest scarce marketing money more wisely. Get tips about what big companies do and what a small business can do.
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How big companies measure marketing
Know this: They have entire departments fully dedicated to this. They spend 3% to 10% of their total marketing budget on measurement (research, tools and analysis). Even with all this investment and focus, they often know what worked but they may not know exactly why. Marketing works because of a combination of things (product, price, promotion, place and luck and timing). It's very difficult to actually determine among all the variables what actually drives sales. So, if you're a small business or non-profit figure out what are the few things that you want to measure and monitor and focus on continuously learning and improving.
Big company research that small businesses can do too
These are the things that we think are the 80% return for your money and time:
- Messaging research to create, hone and validate messages used in marketing
- Identifying who your most profitable customers are (so you can focus on selling to them and find more customers like them)
- Customer satisfaction surveys or patient satisfaction surveys
- Measuring brand buzz - what people are saying online
- Web Analytics to understand web-based program performance. Google is now developing tools that will allow you to plug other marketing programs, like advertising and email, into its anaytics engine to get a more comprehensive picture of how your entire program is performing.
If you have more money and time, then we'd suggest:
- Customer Segmentation and Targeting
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Mystery Shopping
- Conduct a competitive audit
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Ad testing
- Usability research on websites and other interactive tools
These articles may be helpful
- Typical Advertising Results
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How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Advertising
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Great Advertising defined
- Qualitative research
- Quantitative research and in-market tracking to learn what marketing people recalled and what action or behavior change they made as a result.
- Market Research - you'll find all the MarketingZone articles on marketing research here
- Marketing Effectiveness & ROI - you'll find all the relevant MarketingZone articles about that here
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Develop a plan to measure marketing effectiveness
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