1. Accountability

Accountability is the process of accurate tracking as to exactly what is and isn't working. You should to monitoring all your marketing activities, including advertising campaigns, websites, leads and in-store purchases. Your marketing activities should be subject to rigorous scrutiny so that you can learn and make improvements in the future.

A lack of accountability applies to businesses of all sizes. It is especially prominent in small and medium sized businesses where owners and managers must juggle multiple responsibilities at the same time. It is important to remember that marketing is more than just advertising. Advertising is simply one of many channels used to communicate with your customers.

Marketing activities include: product presentation, sales messaging, all interaction with customers, the sales processes, pricing, product development, packaging, market research. Advertising is simply one aspect of communicating with potential customers. To be effective, you must organise all the pieces of the marketing puzzle.

With regard to your advertising spend, you should be able to:

Know how each advertising channel is performing for any given campaign
Be able to accurately calculate the cost per sale/revenue generated for each advertising source
For search engine advertising you should be able to track keywords back to enquiries, leads and sales, even with in-store purchases (click to read more about our unique tracking technologies).

While some businesses make an effort to track advertising performance, often, the methods used are inadequate or fail to provide an accurate picture of what is really going on.

We use a systematic approach to track and measure:

How each advertising channel is performing
What search phrases are leading to in store purchases (click for info on our unique tracking system)
The return on ad spend on each channel
The average time between someone visiting your website and purchasing from you

If you are not tracking these accurately, how can you know what advertising channel is the most effective?

If your job is to grow your business, you need to know exactly what is and isn't working. You must be constantly experimenting with new strategies and evaluating if they work. The more you do this, the better your return on advertising investment will become over time.