To become successful in business, it’s crucial to actively promote your business to gain new customers. Let’s face it… No promotion equals no new customers. It’s that simple!
Your marketing campaigns should make the marketplace aware of your product or service and where they can get it.
If you’ve ever spent money on advertising, you will know that it can be a costly process. Whether the cost is measured in time, effort, money or a mixture of all three – the one thing that counts the most is the results. A lack of results from a marketing campaign can be a real disappointment.
More often than not, it’s a case of hit-and-miss which leads to frustration and a wasted advertising budget.
Here are three steps to take that explain how you can gauge how effective your marketing campaigns are and to rapidly improve the response rates of future campaigns.
Step 1: Test & Tracking – You really should be Tracking and Testing the response to your marketing campaigns. This is the ABC of promotions. If you don’t know how responsive a particular ad is, how can you possibly gauge the ad’s effectiveness? Not by guessing, that’s for sure! It is essential that you Test & Track because this keeps you in control of your earnings. If your campaigns aren’t creating the desired outcome – sales – something needs to be changed. By Testing & Tracking, you can make changes, retest and gauge the results to repeat the process until you do generate the necessary effect and therefore increase your profits.
Step 2: Tweaking – What areas need looking at? Here is a short list of questions you can ask yourself. The answer to these questions should be ” Yes”. If the answer is “No”, then simply tweak the item and Test & Track to produce a better response.
Ad Copy: Does it have an eye-catching headline? Is it well written with the correct grammar and punctuation? Have you edited it over and over to create what you’d consider a perfect advertisement? Does it make the reader want to take action and pull out their credit card? If you wouldn’t respond to the ad yourself, a rewrite is a must.
Product Demand: If you truly aim to make sales, your advertising needs to be put in front of the people who will want to purchase your product. Have you carried out or have access to market research data on the product you are offering? If it’s a niche-target product, are you targeting the appropriate audience? Have you polled your list or web site visitors to find out what they really want? Feedback is precious and should be taken into serious consideration.
Sales Page: Does your sales page look good to the naked eye without making you frown in pain? Does it have an eye-catching headline? Does it appeal to the reader’s sensibilities and rouse their emotions? Have you used short paragraphs? Have you included bullet point lists?
Order Page: Have you included a guarantee that removes the risk taken by the customer? Have you provided several payment options where applicable? Have you made the purchasing process as quick and simple as possible? Have you included your contact details?
Price: If everything else appears to be set correctly but you’re still not receiving the response you need, consider revising the price and Test & Track. It’s not always the cheaper price surprisingly! 100 is a good number to use for split-testing. ie: If you’re testing two pages, the first to receive 100 responses is the one to adopt.
Step 3: QA – Usually QA stands for Quality Assurance and it still does, but in this instance, it also means Quality Advertising. Testing & Tracking and Tweaking can be an ongoing process that you continually carry out using free or paid advertising. There are many forms of advertising available. Free advertising methods are excellent for Testing & Tracking because they can illustrate how well an ad pulls. But for now, let’s concentrate on the effective, paid advertising methods. Why? Because paid advertising brings results… Well it should – but it doesn’t always!
It’s imperative that you gauge the effectiveness of the advertising vehicle that you are utilizing through Testing & Tracking. If you don’t, you could be throwing your hard-earned money straight down the drain.
If you have paid for an advertising campaign through a company and the results are less than you hoped for, you need to look into why the results were dismal. How do you do that? It certainly pays to ask questions and dig deeper to see exactly how your advertisement is being delivered.
QUOTE OF THE DAY …
“Determine the real reasons that people buy your product or service then
organize your entire marketing campaigns around them”
I’d love to have your input about how you track and  test your marketing campaigns … as I’m sure many others would, so let’s have your comments below.