Promote It

Measuring Results

Is Your Advertising Effective?

As you’re putting together your promotional plan, be sure to build in measurements of success. Determine an acceptable return on investment (ROI) and put methods in place to track the role of your advertising in helping your business reach desired goals. Ask customers how they learned about your product and/or services, so you can determine which advertising vehicles were most effective. Use online metrics (such as Google Analytics) whenever possible, but don’t neglect the value of printed registration forms and questionnaires or a friendly face-to-face chat with customers. You may be amazed at what you learn!

Public Relations

PR Has Value, Too

While it’s likely that your promotional efforts will center on advertising, you should consider including some public relations activities in your plan. Standard PR tools include press releases, feature articles, white papers, fact sheets, speeches and public service announcements.

As a promotional device, public relations is similar to advertising, but without the guarantees. When you advertise, you buy a particular space or time slot and you get to fill it with exactly what you want to say. With public relations, you take your chances by simply sending a story or PSA to a media outlet in the hopes that it will be used in some form.

So why bother with public relations? Two reasons: (1) preparing a public relations message costs less than creating and placing an ad; and (2) public relations activities carry a kind of credibility that ads do not. Everyone knows an advertising message was bought and paid for; a story that appears in the editorial columns of a newspaper, on the other hand, is perceived as being unbiased and, therefore, more credible.

Tags: Florida Small Business, Growing Your Business