Just Something To Keep In Mind...
A few months ago I received a call from a very good friend of mine. He was looking for an agency to work with for some help in social media marketing. The day he called me we had an hour-long conversation about his business, where it stood, and the direction he wanted to take it in. In that conversation, I asked him, a question that I ask every business owner that approaches me, which was, how do you market your business currently? The response was “We just signed a 1-year contract for billboard advertisements.”
I asked him "why billboard ads? Was there a specific reason for this decision?" The response I received was "It's what we have been doing for a while and we got a great deal on them." I later asked him the following questions
How do you measure its success?
How do you know they work?
How many people actually pay attention to them?
How many leads do you usually get with this?
He didn’t have an answer to these questions and I don't blame him. It’s difficult to answer questions about billboard ads. We know that some billboard companies are making efforts to "step into the digital age." However, we are referring to the commonly known billboards that have graphics posted on a huge display on highways with a heavy population of commuters. Although the steps to move to a digital age are underway for billboard ads, they are not caught up just yet. We see a large portion of billboard ads following the traditional format they did over a century ago.
As a business owner who is trying to grow your business, you are under a lot of pressure to make the right decisions, cut costs, and monitor your successes and failures. The world we live in became more complicated over the past decade and everybody is trying to understand the shifts in technology, society, and communication. While it is not impossible, it can become very difficult to do when you have so much on your plate already.
So I ask when thinking about your marketing efforts, what do you consider when making a decision? Advertising is not the same as it was a decade ago. We now have the ability to monitor success on every single campaign that is created. Success can be measured differently for every business owner, such as the number of views, leads, calls/messages, and visits to the store. So why not use a marketing platform that can give you those exact numbers?
We are not here to belittle any marketing method, but simply to ask if business owners consider the measurability of the marketing that they are deploying. Many businesses want results in order to grow. However, your marketing efforts need to prove results with data, analytics, and insight. Without these numbers how can anybody measure the level of success any platform is producing?
Overall, every business is different and no one idea or effort can massively grow your business. Everything takes trial and error, patience, and sacrifice. However, if you are paying for marketing services every single month, why not be certain that you can monitor the results and see the analytics every month for yourself? Just something to keep in mind….
