Israel Business Management

How can a company measure the marketing dollars that it is spending? For a start-up or small company, cash is the lifeblood that can not be spilled without getting some type of return. For large corporations, expenses are being held tighter than ever before.

So, in a short period of time, how can the spend be measured?

1. Google Adwords are an easy marketing tool for any company trying to drive traffic to its website or an online trial experience or download. See Google for more details on this Pay Per Click (PPC) program. The advantage of using something like Google for this is the ability to integrate with the other tools that Google provides, like Google Analytics. Your company can increase or decrease its spend by anlyzing the data that is almost in real-time. You can set a limit to monthly spend, if budgets are tightly watched, even if revenue spikes.

2. Gain a true understanding of the return - The way to do this is set a clear goal that can be measured. Is it sales (revenue), is it just lead generation (maybe for partners or even for internal sales staff), or another metric? Brand awareness is very hard to measure for most medium to small companies, so a different metirc needs to be chosen.

3. Plan for follow-up - You are spending money to draw people in. So, now that you have launched a program, what are the next steps with the lead? How are you going to "touch" the potential customer? Email, download of an asset from your site (white paper, picture, file, etc.). phone...You will need a well-defined process to gather your leads and funnel them to a qualification procedure (this could be run by sales or marketing or a joint tele-marketing group.)

4. Do not pull the plug too soon - Just like a development cycle of a product, no matter how much planning you have before your marketing campaign goes into production, there will be "bugs". Those will need to be addressed. This does not mean that you should not plan for what happens when you have a live potential client on the other end of the web, phone or other medium you have chosen. You may say to yourself that you should shut down the program due to these challenges, but I stress that you will never have a 100% perfect run on the first attempt. So, expect some hiccups and continue to fix and measure.

5. Ask for help - There are plenty of online forums of how to build your site to better garner leads. if you have some money, you may want to engage a consultant or firm to help plan and measure the program and its spend.

There is so much more to do and talk about with marketing, but let's stop here for this post.