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Are Your Advertisements As Effective As You Think?
Do you simply look at the number of sales and enquiries or do you look deeper and try to evaluate why people have come. Of course, to determine how effective our advertising is we should look at a number of things... Media type - this can have a big effect on where you should be placing your advertising bucks next time, for example...you may have received a ton of prospects from Campaign #1, but very few closing deals, yet Campaign #2 brought in fewer but more targeted prospects and a higher closing ratio as it was a different medium Your budget - do you need to spend $100,000's to get great results? If you are a very large corporation you may need to, however if you think smart, there are literally hundreds of marketing weapons that cost very little but can bring in massive results. At the end of the day, your advertisement needs to make a profit What was your objective - did the advertisement do what you wanted it to do? Did you intend to increase your company's brand awareness? Then look at including up-to-date market research to check on effectiveness. If you wanted a direct response, then was this response acted on? Consistency - was this advert part of a series or a one-off? If it was part of a series - how much better has it performed than the previous 'control'. Are you consistently improving? Your target market - is your target market responding to your advertising or do you need to adjust the demographics... It's useful to plan a meeting (regular if the campaign runs over a long period of time) to go through the data that you have collected for each account and measure the performance of the advertisement. You should begin to see a clearer view as to how efficient or not your advertising and marketing spend is. As with all advertising and marketing...you should always test, test, test! Ensure that you have a benchmark for your advertisements. In other words, define all the areas that you need to address (headline, sub-head, body etc...) and make sure that the advert works. Once the advertisement has been placed, ensure that the important information (as highlighted previously) has been recorded and then alter a single aspect of the copy for the next advertising campaign you run. That one thing could be the headline or the sub-heading of your advertising. Having chosen which part of the copy you want to change, do it and then run the advertisement again, checking the efficiency each time. If the original control version performs better, then keep it. Should the existing advertisement continue to outperform the changed version, then stay with it and develop a new option... Look at your advertisements as tools for your business. they should never be viewed as 'luxuries' that you can play around with - in general they cost too much. Make them work by determining the efficiency of your advertising and you will make the profit. Determine the overall efficiency by how much profit you are making, then keep and improve the best adverts and bin the poor performers. Copyright (c) 2008 Michael Hemmins Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com Michael Hemmins is a successful home business owner and Certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach. Michael is also the webmaster of Ideas for A Home Based Business. Why not join Michael's free newsletter and get your free copy of his 325pg eBook on how to build your successful online business. |
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