Many businesses make basic mistakes while forming marketing strategies that lead to the wastage of about half the budget. Your marketing budget is precious and wasting it won’t help your company or business grow. It is your investment to build one of the core parts of your business, that is, marketing. What is even worse is not knowing the cause of this wastage of budget.
Chances are, no matter how high your marketing budget is, it is never enough. This is one indicator that should not go unnoticed, if this is happening there is surely some wastage happening.
You will also need to closely measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Are they driving the results? Are those results sufficient? Are those results providing ROI? According to Adobe, 40% of marketing departments think their companies’ marketing is ineffective.
But how do you measure the ineffectiveness of your marketing strategies?
Using a Marketing Scorecard:
You must have noticed that you will never know which side won the game, if nobody kept the score. Creating a scorecard is easy, you can use Excel spreadsheet or use marketing dashboards.
To get the idea about what kind of content you should track, use the following points-
- Google Analytics Statistics, like unique visitors, time on site etc.
- Money generation through campaigns, ads and similar data
- Newsletter subscribers
- Social media metrics, like number of followers, number of visits to the site through social media
- Measure your ROI
- Number of leads, inquiries, new sales and so on.
Do so at regular intervals to add the obtained results in your scorecard. After a period of time, this data integrated in a single sheet will help you form a clear judgment. It will also help you make changes quickly and see how things are going.
Measuring your ROI:
To elaborate this point further, there are a few questions that you will ask. Below are a few examples-
Marketing scorecard
- Is there an overall increase and specific increase in one area?
- Are there any progress in soft metrics?
Leads
- How many leads is it taking to convert to a sale?
- Are your leads converting?
Marketing costs
- How much more or less did you spend in any area?
- Are your marketing costs on time?
For smaller companies it is comparatively easier to answer these questions but at the end of the day all the efforts are worth it.
After measuring your ineffectiveness and before making the corrections, understand a few basics like:
- Marketing is all about engaging people at the places they are spending most of their time. Therefore, the first thing you need to ensure is you are using your marketing budget to do exactly that.
- Determine the overall goal of marketing. Goal setting is meant to define your actions. Choose the right goals that are genuinely achievable and not the ones that do not go with your current reality.
Nothing comes out of Nothing. If you are wasting your marketing budget and still not making efforts to correct the causes then nothing will change. Appearing before the right eyes with predefined goals will at least pave a way for you marketing strategy. Your rectifications will completely depend upon where and how your budget is getting wasted.
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