Businesses know they must advertise to gain market share, but often they are not too critical about the return on that investment. Business owners may end up scrounging around for different business cash options to fund that advertising campaign, but then fail to determine the actual value of that campaign. Sometimes the return may be hard to quantify, but there are strategies that can give you a good idea of what is working and what is not, and they are not too hard to implement.
Where Did You Hear About Us?
It’s an easy question for new customers to answer and it can provide invaluable insight into what form of advertising works best with your demographic. You may actually be running different advertisements in different venues, so having a survey at the end of your sales experience that allows someone to tell you where you got the lead can help you plan next year’s campaign better. This can be done online, or in an email after a purchase, if you were smart enough to get the email address of your new customer.
Promotional Coupons and Special Offers
If you know how many coupons are printed and how many are redeemed and by which zip codes, you can figure out what the return on your investment is for a coupon promotional campaign. If you decide to do a Groupon offer, and you have to pretty much give away your services, you had better assess how the extra volume of work at a reduced price might impact your regular customers. Advertising your business via a group offer is very effective at getting the word out, but you want to make sure it also creates some profit for you as well. At the very least, you do not want it costing you business as you already are paying for the campaign to get the word out in the first place.