Marketing is a significant spend for your business, and it’s important to make sure you know if you’re making the right choices with how you spend that money. Today we’re looking at the different ways you both measure and ensure that your marketing is performing for you.
Testing
Before you launch new ads, you can test them to make sure you’ve designed adverts your customers will respond to. A small-scale launch, with the actions inspired by the ads (clicks and purchases, primarily) tracked can help you feel confident that when committing to a full launch it will perform as you need it to.
You can also dig into more in-depth creative testing. Launching different versions of the ads to different audiences with different creative elements, or different versions of your brand can help you choose the most effective possible version of your campaign, and measure your brand uplift – the value your branding brings to your products.
Performance Marketing
Performance marketing uses the huge amount of data that’s available now to upend the traditional relationship between advertisers and the platforms they advertise on. The traditional way adverts work is that a business pays for space in newspapers or magazines, posters to put up in prominent public places, or for digital ads on social networks in the hope that people will see them and be influenced.
Since consumer activities can be tracked, rather than paying for space, you can pay for the action. You define what you want: a click, a conversion, a lead generated and pay when the marketing spot achieves that aim. This is well-targeted and much more financially viable even for small businesses, as you only pay for success.
The more data you have the better your performance marketing can work for you: you can optimise your ads to get those actions and target them and budget more effectively. If you don’t maintain strict control over your budget, runaway ads could eat through a lot of money, and if you don’t target effectively, you could waste money serving ads to and getting clicks from customers who won’t actually buy.
Specialists
It’s well worth your time working with a market research company to build up the insight you need to make your ads work more effectively. They have the reach to get you an understanding of your full potential market – not just the existing customers you can survey, and the understanding to turn that data into insight. You should look at the cost of a market research agency not as an expense but as an investment.
