Investing or Gambling: What Are You Doing With Your Marketing Dollars?

March 3, 2020

The old school marketing techniques were built on brand awareness. No one can argue that more people being aware of your brand is going to be a good thing. There just isn’t a good way to measure the real business impact of these campaigns. Back in the day, these traditional methods used “impressions” as a way to measure how effective they would be. That just means how many opportunities the advertisement had to hit someones eyeballs. There were no other options. People spent large amounts of money on billboards, commercials, and newspaper ads with the hope to get their brand in front of as many people as possible… with no idea what was going to happen afterwards.

If you spend $7,000 on a billboard for a month, do you know exactly how many leads that generates? Nope. That’s a gamble.

Fast forward to 2019 where digital has taken over the world. Using strategic advertising online lets you get hyper-specific about the audience you are targeting. No more “spray and pray” approach for your ads. You nearly get to hand select who you’re showing an ad to. If you sell a product that is ideal for working fathers with toddlers that drives a Honda Civic, you can serve ads to males with children who drive Honda Civics. Targeting doesn’t get much better than that. The best part? You can track, with extreme accuracy, the success from every dollar spent. Use the dollars you put into the ad divided by the conversions you receive from the ad. A truly measurable ROI for your ad spend. You can track every incoming lead and see exactly what marketing campaign they came from. This allows you to understand what marketing campaigns are driving business growth and which ones are not.

If you spend $7,000 in Google Ads targeting specific keywords, do you know exactly how many leads that generates. Yup. That’s investing.

With the right tracking in place, you can watch your advertising dollars turn into customers. You can track so many statistics on your ads that your eyes will start to glaze over:

Impressions
Clicks
Click through rate
Time on site
Conversions
Conversion rate
Cost per click
Cost per conversion
Assisted Conversions
Quality score
Bounce rate
Average frequency
… The list goes on and on

Because of all the statistics available to you, you can make really smart decisions that have real impact on your bottom line. You can see how many clicks an ad generates, how many times someone contacts you after clicking on that ad, and then see if they turn into a customer. It’s an incredible thing to watch as long as you have the right tools in place.

So what?

By tracking the success of your marketing campaigns, you can get extremely granular in how each channel performs. If one channel is doing a lot better than the other, then you know you should move budget over to the higher performing avenue. This is called data-driven marketing. Its fun buzzword marketers like to throw out there to make them sound smart. All it really means is tracking granular KPIs for each campaign, monitoring the performance, and adapting your strategy to what the data tells you. Using data to your advantage in marketing is going to expedite your business growth. You’ll gain huge efficiencies with your marketing dollars that you’ve never experienced before. The digital age has transformed how we advertise for the better. Being able to track your results at a granular level will transition you from gambling to investing. If you want help with your advertising strategies and want to see your ad spend do more for your business, we’re here for you.

Investing or Gambling: What Are You Doing With Your Marketing Dollars?

So what?

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