I would like you to think about the effectiveness of your marketing for a minute. What is the best marketing move you have made in your business over the past couple of years? Maybe you have been successful with content marketing on social media, garnering a lot of followers of your brand. Maybe you have promoted your business through an event sponsorship or went to a trade show. Perhaps you have had a successful e-mail marketing campaign or built a new web site. Whatever you consider your best marketing move, how do you know you have been effective? You might say you set a goal and achieved it. Goals are good to measure marketing effectiveness, but too often we set very soft goals, such as getting so many engagements on social media. The problem is, social engagement doesn’t necessarily lead to a sale. The true test of marketing is sales.

Typically we look at marketing from its ability to create brand awareness. That is very important, but your marketing should never stop with just awareness. If you are assuming that marketing is finished after a potential customer understands what your brand represents, you have set a soft goal. I want you to take a look at your marketing in reverse order. Take a look at your best sales and then work backwards. Look at the biggest and best customers from the past two years. What were the steps that were taken to convince them to buy from you the very first time? What role did your marketing play in their decision making process? If you have trouble connecting the dots from marketing to sales, you need to rethink what you are doing with your marketing.

I find that many companies are using repeating marketing methods without any measurements of their effectiveness. They are assuming that their marketing is effective, but they have not taken the time to test those assumptions. That will likely lead to wasted time, effort, and money. It is time well spent to set goals and test your marketing methods for effectiveness.

There are a number of measurement devices attached to different mediums today. Analytics abound in web-based applications. But as I stressed before, the real test is your bottom line. Are you making new sales?

I would encourage you to create a flow chart that tracks customers through the marketing process. Do they have a knowledge of your brand? If so, what must you do to transition them from a knowledge of your brand to an interest in purchasing from you? Measure this. What does it take from interest to negotiating price? What marketing message are you using to present the price? Again, measure your marketing effectiveness here. It will not take long before you begin to see clearly what is working for you in marketing and what is not.