Marketing is one of the most significant investments you’ll make for your business. While you might spend more money on setting up, renting premises, employing staff and designing or buying products, your advertising and marketing budget needs to spent effectively and efficiently. If you get your marketing right, the return on investment can be stratospheric, as it tells the world about your products, your business and your brand in a way that really connects with your audience and drives them to make a purchase.
To feel confident in your marketing spend, you need to be able to answer the question ‘does your marketing work?’, ideally before you release it into the world!
It’s this issue we’re looking at today, to help you take an informed look at your advertising and marketing.
Research
As you’re putting an advertising campaign together, you need data to ensure your creative choices are going to resonate with your audience. A market research agency can help with creative testing, ensuring all the elements going into a new round of advertising, from images, to text, even down to the level of the font, are all carefully chosen from shortlisted options to speak to your audience.
As your campaign comes together, you can continue with more sophisticated kinds of testing. A/B testing lets you see the results of two different versions of an advert ‘in the wild’. For this test, you release two different designs of advert on a small scale to two different groups of people. You can track their responses over time and see which version of the advert gets more clicks, conversions and sales, and therefore which one is the best to launch on a larger scale and through your weight behind.
Over Time
One of the most important things you can do is continue to log the results of your marketing pushes over time. Longevity gives you access to more and more data, allowing you to optimise each advertising effort and ensure its working for you.
It’s important to review that data and turn the insights you derive from it into actions. Fashions and attitudes change, and you might see trends over time that allow you to anticipate major changes in the market and adapt your marketing to suit. If tried and tested tactics stop working with the same effectiveness they always have, it might be the time for a rethink, so you can ensure your marketing materials are communicating with the market as it is now, and really working both for you and your customers.