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The Rush to (No) Results

Posted by Jason Pinto on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 11:38 AM in Business, Marketing

The world of marketing can be a very fun one to be in.  In the right environment, a marketing department should be filled with ideas, creativity, and excitement.  Every day, there are new campaigns efforts to experience and learn from.  There are new tools and medias that can help a company promote their product and service.

However, excitement can be put to an end quickly if marketing fundamentals are forgotten.

You may be very excited to tell management and accounting about your social media activities, but if they cannot grasp the ROI, then you may find yourself in a bit of trouble.

So, how can you ensure that your excitement will be shared by your entire company?

Never forget to measure it

For example, maybe you are investing money putting up a banner ad on a website that receives a lot of traffic. Your initial excitement may be about the content of the banner ad… the animation, the video, or the audio that will be used.  However, just as much focus needs to be put on ensuring you measure the effectiveness of that ad.

Does the banner ad link directly to your website? If so, will you be able to easily find out how many visitors came to the site from that banner ad?

If not, you may want the banner ad to link to a landing page first, which would allow you to track the click, before they are redirected to your home page.

Or, you may want the banner ad to go to a landing page that provides information about your company, but that also tries to gather data from your visitors. Perhaps you pose a couple of survey questions right on the page, making it as easy as possible for people to request additional information from your company, or to set up a demo, etc.

These same types of tactics could be used from other medias. Perhaps you’ve just launched a new video. Will it display a “for more information, please visit this URL” at the end of the video? Or perhaps you want to track how many people snapped a picture of your very first QR Code/web campaign?

This also greatly applies to social media – perhaps you are posting compelling content on Twitter and Facebook. Do you know if people are actually clicking links from those sites?

Obstacles were made to be overcome

Some companies hesitate from trying new medias because they don’t think they have a perfect grasp on it.  We are not encouraging this approach at all. We strongly believe that you need to “Just do it” – use social media, videos, QR Codes, and more in your marketing efforts. The more you do, the better you’ll get.

But never forget marketing fundamentals – no matter what the media, the fundamentals primarily stay the same.  Promote and share information as much as possible – and if you can measure the effectiveness of each effort, your campaigns will improve, and your boss will truly be happy.

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