Take Time to Measure Your Marketing Success

How do you measure your marketing success? First, figure out what your definition of success is. When you wrote your marketing plan or developed your ad campaign, what were your goals? Did you want to see an increase in traffic, emails or phone calls? Did you expect an increase in sales of a certain product? Before beginning any marketing effort, you should have specified your goals and targets. Only then can you measure to see if they were met.

Learn from Your Customer with Surveys

You can measure your marketing success by using customer surveys. You'll find more information about that and some samples on my Customer Surveys page.

Code and Track Your Advertising

Another way to measure your marketing success is to put coupons in printed advertising, and code them differently. For example, the coupon in a newspaper ad might have the code N20 printed on it, while the same coupon on a direct mail piece would be N60. For radio, use a different phone number or tell the listener to say they heard it on WXYZ station to receive a special offer (which of course you spell out in the radio spot).

You may run two different types of advertising, instant response and image. Your goal with instant response is to increase sales immediately. An example would be advertising a special promotion, so you can measure an increase in sales right away. The purpose of image advertising is to keep your business name in the public eye over a period of time, so you won't find its effectiveness as easy to measure. My suggestion is to plot when you run image advertising over a period of time. If you know how to use Microsoft Excel, it works well for this. For the same time period, on the same chart, show company sales. Analyze to see if there are any spikes when image ads run or if there is a steady increase over time.

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ROI - Did You Earn More Than You Spent?

The one method all marketers use (and you should too) in measuring marketing success is figuring return on investment (ROI). Did the results of your effort surpass the expense of the marketing? In books and on various web sites, you'll find some detailed formulas for figuring ROI. Here, I provide some very simple examples of figuring marketing ROI, with a Campaign ROI Calculator and an Annual Marketing ROI Calculator. The files here are in PDF form. If you would like me to email them in an Excel format, just contact me.

As a small business, you may not have the time or money for complicated ad or marketing measurement. That's fine, because you can gain plenty of insight with the simple tools I've outlined here and on the customer surveys page. After you've used these tools, you'll find it difficult to make marketing decisions without the direction they provide.