Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

It starts off by first establishing goals of your program upfront. Even if you cannot set realistic targets, because this is your first ever program, it will help focus the metrics you need to capture. Think of metrics like market share, revenie increase, new sales leads, influenced sales volume, even attendees at conference.

Only then can you decide if the marketing program was successful.

You definitely need to be able to measure your advertising effort. The trick often is that it is at best witch-craft. For instance, if you are having a 1 day sale on snow tires, and to support that your advertising consists of a badly conceived and small ad that is lost in the middle of the weekly entertainment section of your community newspaper, but it just happens to snow really hard the day before your sale ... WOW, sales will go up. If you are simply following sales as your metric, you'd repeat that campaign again. Hmmm...

Depending on the type of ad that you're doing, I'd do customer research project looking at the "recall" of your ad. That will tell you more about if customers noticed your ad, and (better) took action because of it. It also reduces other influences which could make you take the wrong decision when you run your next campaign.

Failed for who? What might be a success for one company might be a bitter failure for another. As others have said, it's about expectations, expenditures, and measured results. And to avoid large failures, create smaller marketing experiments to test your expectations before increasing its scope.

I guess it comes down to how it performs against the expectation. What result were you expecting from the marketing? Were you hoping for increased sales or more name recognition? Did you get it. If there was not a goal to begin with there will be problems measuring the effectiveness of the marketing.

Mike