Business, both big and small, understand the importance of measuring results. There’s the ultimate measure of success, which is measured by the overall success and profitability of the business, but there are many other ways, both internally and externally, that a business measures the performance of its employees and other assets. If your business has implemented branding, marketing and advertising initiatives, it is just as important to measure the success of each initiative as it is to measure the success of any other important metric of your business, but it may not be readily apparent exactly how you can and should measure their success.
Why Do I Need To Evaluate My Branding, Marketing And Advertising?
Smart entrepreneurs and business managers understand the importance of evaluating and measuring business metrics, as doing a cursory review of your revenues and overall profitability may not be telling you the whole story. If things are “good enough,” you may not feel motivated to determine whether your newest content marketing campaign is a successful one. The question is how many more potential customers could you attract and convert if your newest campaign was a success? No matter how significant or insignificant your branding, marketing and advertising efforts may be, and no matter how much money and resources you’ve dedicated to these efforts in the past, it almost always pays to find out if you can make improvements that can subsequently give your bottom line a boost.
Setting Goals and Measurements
In order to determine whether or not your branding, marketing and advertising initiatives are successful or require some sort of overhaul, you first must determine what goals and measurements should be used to effectively evaluate them. Believe it or not, while there are established tools for measuring and evaluating your branding, marketing and advertising, only you can determine and establish the benchmarks you are trying to reach. While it is detrimental to the future success and viability of your business to ignore their success or failure, it can also be detrimental to set your standards and benchmarks too high. A great branding, marketing or advertising campaign should boost your brand awareness, attract new customers to your business and ultimately boost your bottom line. At the same time these aren’t magical properties that will double or triple your revenues overnight. Only by realistically and accurately gauging the effectiveness of your branding, marketing and advertising campaign can you obtain realistic and useful insights into their effectiveness.
How Effective is Your Campaign?
When gauging the effectiveness of specific marketing and advertising campaigns, setting goals or metrics and measuring them are relatively straightforward. If your marketing or advertising campaign brings in a specific number of subscribers or increases sales within a specific period of time, you can quantitatively measure their effectiveness with a relative degree of certainty. However, measuring the effectiveness of your branding may be harder to accomplish because both the collection and interpretation of qualitative data may require a considerably longer testing period. If you have the resources available, there are more expensive tests that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of branding. These can be assembling and polling a focus group or asking your customers to complete a survey to measure their reaction to your branding.
In our next post, we will delve into the subject of taking the long view when it comes to your brand, marketing and advertising.