Make sure your adspend works

Tuli Shivute is the Founder of Grow Sales Fast Consulting. He offers advice how to improve sales through advertising and marketing. Tuli is the author of an advertising efficiency guide which is available at www.growsalesfast.com.
Is your marketing and advertising budget effectively getting more customers for less money?
Before one can strive to get better results, it’s imperatvie to first know what measurable results are produced. Knowing how your marketing and advertising dollars are performing for you is critical to minimizing waste by eliminating what doesn’t work and getting higher returns by growing what does work.
The aim is to develop a record of numeric results your marketing and advertising produces. It is easy to see that results are increasing or decreasing when you look at the numbers. But, those numbers have to be there first and you create them by measuring and recording the results.

Improving the efficiency of your marketing and advertising budget means getting more customers for less money. Let’s say for example, that your company sells a N$10,000 product or service. You spend N$50,000 on marketing and advertising, generated 500 enquiries and 20 of those turned into customers, meaning you produced N$200,000 in gross revenue. Now deduct N$50 000 for marketing costs, which leaves you with N$150,000 in gross profits from that campaign.
Eventually the campaign produced a return on investment of 4 to 1, which implies that for every N$50,000 spent on this campaign you can expect to produce revenue that is 4 times that investment.
If you doubled the efficiency of your marketing campaigns by spending that same N$50,000 then that means that for that same expensiture you could expect to produce N$400,000, making it a return investment of 8 to 1. All of this begins by measuring the results from your marketing activities and noticing how to improve your results.
There are several ways of doing this.
First, making your adverts or marketing campaigns generate more responses from the same cost; making your advert generates more enquiries than ever before, which increases the number of potential customers.
Second, turn more of those enquiries into customers.
Third, get your customers to buy from you more often during the year and spend more money with you. If your customers only come for your products or services 4 times a year and only when they have no choice the goal is to get them to you an extra 2 or 4 times in the year so that they then come to you a total of 6 to 10 times because you’ve asked them to. All extra times they come to you equals extra profit.
This is how you make your marketing and advertising budgets more effictive and efficient to get more sales and profits for the same amount of money it costs you right now, or less than that. There are many other benefits to measuring your marketing and advertising activities and perfomance; you are able to set goals and evaluate your progress, you always know exactly where you stand, you can identify key aspects you want to refine, you are able to see the results of your refinements, you can quickly and accurately isolate where the problems are and lastly there is no middle ground. The numbers don’t lie.
With that I will close this article with a quote by Dr James Harrington, who was involved in quality and performance improvement projects since 1950. He said “measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”