How do you evaluate the results of your marketing or advertising?
This should be a fluid subject, never over, never mastered. However you measure your marketing’s results, chances are you are wrong! Too often, we measure with the shortest stick possible, and determine that over half of all of marketing/ads are wasted.
A few years ago, when I was working with Victoria’s Secret, I learned that the better you get at measuring the value of your online marketing, the more you’ll be able to use it and outperform against your rivals. Successful marketing campaigns breed other successful ones, but often we can’t find the success because our measurement tools are out of date.
Often, we use old or overly-conservative metrics to measure by. They are legacy rules that are seldom dusted off and updated. When you run a marketing program, what is your time-line to measure success by? Are you sure you are measuring *all* of the results? If you measure within a 90 day period, for example, you may miss all the value that occurs within 120 or 365 days. Do you measure where your new customers come from? Do you give them choices or ask for them to source where they heard about you? These are all important questions that are seldom answered anew.
Challenge yourself to come up with new timelines, new tools and new goals for your next marketing program. This isn’t the most glamorous part of marketing, but in many cases, this is the area where you can improve the most.
