A true wonder of effective marketing is the amazing rates of returns one can achieve. When these are compared to risks/rewards that can be achieved on the stock market, you will see effective marketing can outperform most investments.
Marketing is an investment, an investment of acquiring new customers. The down side can be negligible because we can test marketing campaigns on a small scale. If the testing works and a good returns are made then you can confidently scale up the campaign.
If the testing showed poor results then you have lost the money for the test only rather than the costs incurred for a large scale campaign. So the downside of a marketing campaign can always be managed and costs made negligible. Not so easy to manage the risk in the stock market.
Once you know the return you are achieving with your test, then you can predict how the campaign will work. Also, this gives you great confidence because if the campaign is repeatable then you have a sure method for generating the same return over and over again.
Now, depending on your business, the returns can be extraordinary compared to returns in shares. If shares go up by 5-10% in a month then that can be considered an excellent result. In marketing you can have returns in excess of 50% - 400% regularly and that beats what most investors can achieve.
This is truly magical, seeing marketing as an investment is the key to increasing sales and/or leads.
Big companies and sophisticated small companies know that by diligently measuring and testing marketing, then wonderful returns can be created, but this can only happen if you measure and test.
By the same token, improving the underlying database of contacts in your target market will enable you to improve your marketing results. Measure the quality of data and the quality of your intelligence and you will have the ability truly maximise your marketing.
Finding a measure for data quality and data intelligence isn’t always easy, but we have some ideas that can get you started. Acuate’s Seven Dimension of Data Quality is a framework to help measure your data quality and data intelligence.
By using a consistent measure it gives you the power to manage the data when targeting niches or segments. Coupled with sophisticated marketing techniques of measurement and testing, extraordinary returns can be achieved.
