Make Your Marketing $ Accountable

First Posted July 20, 2009

One of the questions I’ve been asked many times in the past 16 years is one of accountability: “How can we ensure our marketing efforts will work?” The answer comes asking the right questions to ensure the products and services you are buying deliver the audience you need.

The following are key questions you should be asking before you buy any online or print marketing:

Is your magazine circulation audited? This means the magazine has hired a 3rd party company to verify that who they claim they mail their magazine to is in fact correct. Think of it like buying safety glasses that have the Canadian Safety Association seal of approval; buying an audited publication means you know the audience is qualified.

Does your company have a readership study? This information is different from an audit (above). This research demonstrates the habits of the audience such as: taking action from using the products/services, time spent reading/using the products/services, demographics including spending/budgets of the audience, etc. These types of statistics will help you determine if the audience is interacting with the product which in turn means your advertising dollars will be effective.

What can you tell me about your online audience? I have written previously about measuring your online marketing efforts (see Chasing Click Thru’s blog post), but before you get to measurement your online media supplier should be able to provide you with statistics that demonstrate how their online audience is interacting with their products. There are thousands of statistics available, but the critical question to ask is ‘what 3rd party service is providing the statistics’, thus providing you with a 3rd party audit similar to the print question above. Some of these key statistics to ask for include:

Monthly Page Views– ask for month over month history to see if the audience is growing thus enhancing your advertisement’s impact.

Monthly Visitors – both unique visitors and total visitors. This will show you if they are attracting new unique visitors each month and if their website is “sticky” and brings the users back more than once/month.

Pages/Visit and Average Time on Site – this will tell you how the users are interacting with the website thus enhancing your advertisement’s impact.

eNewsletters/eDirects – they should be able to tell you the distribution, average impressions and click thru rates that you can expect.