Quantify Your Marketing Efforts

This is an age-old quest for businesses, large and small, to identify and quantify exactly how successful a marketing campaign was and exactly how much the company had benefited from it. If one can accurately identify the ROI (return on investment) of a given campaign, then this data can be used to allocate budget and to cut expenses.

As a starter, you need to identify the scope of your target audience, effectively limiting the scope of your campaign as well as where to collect the data you need.

Once you defined the scope of your target audience, you need to set goals and expectations. For example you may be launching a series of campaigns targeting youth 16-18 years old, whom had never purchased your products before. The idea is to set the focus of your campaigns and to lay down the guidelines which you can later use to determine whether your objectives are met or not. Are you trying to convert leads into prospects? Or are you trying to convert potentials into customers? Are you simply selling or are you cross-selling/up-selling to existing customers?

Next step is to craft the message you would like to convey. Using the example above, are you trying to tell the target audience that your product is hip and cool? Or are you trying to tell them that your product is tech savvy? Was it the choice of color that they can't get elsewhere or was it because your product is affordable to them?

Once you have the message(s) you need to match your target audience and your message(s) to the delivery channels. Is TV more effective in reaching your targets to convey a particular message? Is Internet a better choice than direct mailing? Should you do printed ads or should you sponsor events that your targets are most likely participate?

When your campaigns are ready to launch, you need to define something that can track the results. For example if one of your campaigns consists of coupons, put a tracking number somewhere such that you can do a tally later. Similarly if you are utilizing emails and your website, create a landing page specifically for that campaign, which you can then track all sorts of statistics from the country of origin to page counts to bounce rate etc ...

Another way to track campaigns is to tie them to financial success, although you must be very careful in selecting the time frame because unlike sales events, marketing needs time to work its magic.

Isolate the media when collecting the data. This way not only you can see how a given media, say TV, can do for you, but you can use this data to compare the total effectiveness against other media say, radio or Internet etc. Some companies even track individual TV stations separately to see whether a given TV station is worth spending money on. However since most small businesses do not have the resource to do micro-monitoring, simply separating the media is already a big help.

Kroy Ip is the Sr. Consultant at BTOnline.ca, a Canadian IT company specialized in Hosted Business Solutions such as CRM, Newsletter Marketing and Online Survey. He also designed many OpenSource solutions for clients, including online streaming solutions (for marketing and customer relations purposes), customer survey & membership sign-up systems, online candidates evaluation systems (for recruitment purposes), and online training delivery systems