Marketing: How to Know You’re Getting Your Money’s Worth

Marketing has really come a long way since the old days of strictly print ads, radio ads, and television ads. There are now so many different ways to market your services, brand, or product that it can seem quite overwhelming at times. Marketing has come very far in even just the last 10 years, with the rise of social networking sites, and other internet advancements like YouTube. It is hard to keep track of all of it at times, and keeping track of the results can even be harder. It is a big question of employees to ask if their marketing money is really worth it. How can one even tell? There are many different ways to gauge this, but one must be actively engaged in finding ways to identify their results in correlation to their marketing budget. Tracking your results in your marketing campaigns is getting easier and easier every day. It has become a simple task as where 10 or 15 years ago is was extremely difficult to track your results with this new style of marketing.

How to understand online marketing and your results.

Online marketing is a huge advancement that has taken place over the last 20 years. It started out as a type of advertising that wasn’t very reliable, but as the Internet ages and becomes more accessible to many different users the reliability of online marketing is much greater. Deciding what type of online marketing you will be focusing on is key. There are different ways of displaying your ads online. You can take out ads on social networking sites. If you decide to go this route, there are online dashboards that will allow you to track your conversions and click through rates for your ads. If you are looking to do video ads on YouTube, this type of dashboard will also be available to you so as though you can track your results.

What are the best ways to track my results with marketing?

If you are marketing online, Google has a great analytics system that will help you see if your ads are truly worth it. With the Google analytics system, you will be able to see and asses the different traffic on your website or online store. You will be able to see where all of the traffic is coming from. This makes it easy to correlate between sales, and ads being run. There are even parameters that you can set up which will show you unique data for each one of your conversions.

What if I’m not doing my marketing online?

When you have chosen to do your marketing offline in print, tv, radio, and other sources of advertising, this may a bit trickier to track, but it’s not impossible. If you have a service in which customers need to sign up for, a piece of your sign up sheet could have a survey question asking them where they found out about your company and services. This will better help correlate that sale with the offline ad that you were running. You can also have a brief survey for your customers in which you ask them which ad they have been exposed to. This will let you know how your ads are doing in the market place. Offline marketing is still a great way to go, especially for services or products that are targeted at an older crowd. They are more likely to respond well to the type of ads that they are already familiar with.

Pinpointing exactly where your marketing dollars are going is much easier that it has been in the past. With the advent of online marketing, your data can be looked over in one simple dashboard, giving you the confidence that your marketing dollars are being spent well. No longer do you have to spend time throwing darts at a board with your marketing budget. You will be able to decide which types of ads work best for your business, and you will be able to now focus on those types of ads. These new ways of tracking your sales as correlated to your marketing campaigns will help you to fine tune and perfect the ads for your business.

Written for Marketing2Utah.com, a Utah based print and media advertising company that also provides SEO in Salt Lake City.