Measures of Marketing Effectiveness - Essay Example

Marketing Effectives Marketing Effectives Marketing is a major tool that many businesses rely on to better their sales and to create an image for their brands. It also serves as the avenue that organizations use to build their reputation in the market and the entire society. Therefore, it is important that whenever an organization sends a team to the field to market its goods and services a follow up is set to analyze the effectiveness of the marketing strategy. Different teams use different strategies to market depending on the organization or business they are marketing. Due to this, we can have a variety of metrics that we can use to measure the effectiveness of a marketing strategy used by a business firm. The first measure of marketing effectiveness that organization can rely on when making assessment is the conversion rate. It is a measure of the proportion of guests to ones marketing site who prove to respond to the action used by the marketing strategy. For instance, a firm’s marketing policy may entail people visiting the firm’s site where they are to access some information through signing up. In this case, the guests to the site may access the site but fail to sign up, or they may sign up. This measuring metric considers a marketing move successful when the visitors to the site click through the link and sign up to view the entire marketing material (McDonald, 2011). The second measure of marketing effectiveness is the number of lead generations or inbound links. Having a marketing site is a key necessity if the process is to be conducted through the internet and it is determined to be successful (McDonald, 2011). As people carry out their actives online, they likely to link to sites where they find important materials. Therefore, the number of external links to the firm’s site can be used to determine how important an organization’s products are to the people. The other measure is the search engine traffic that is created due to an organization’s marketing site. The search engines enable us to determine how much traffic is being created by a particular site being searched by many internet users. The search engines include Google and Bing. The bigger the web traffic being associated with our site the most likely our marketing strategy is going to be successful (McDonald, 2011). Finally, the other important measure that can be used to analyze the effectiveness of a marketing strategy used by an organization or business enterprise is the change on the sales. The closed loop marketing analysis is used in this case. It is an analysis that covers the whole marketing process that led to a change in the outcomes of the business (McDonald, 2011). The analysis covers all the events down to the point where a product is being bought by a prospect. All of these four measures can be successful in determining the effectiveness of a marketing policy being employed by an organization when properly used to measure. However, the measure on the impacts on sales and revenues is the most important measure. Here, the total sales that can be linked to the marketing tools are calculated and also ratios determined to note if the general sales of the company have increased. The online sales which are basically due to online marketing can be easily determined and swiftly be accounted to have generated due to the market-seeking strategy adapted. Some offline sales can also be connected to online advertisements by politely asking customers where they got to know about the firm’s products they are buying. The major reason why consideration of the changes on revenue is the most important tool in analyzing the effectiveness of a marketing strategy is the fact that the core objective of any business enterprise is to improve its revenues and profits (McDonald, 2011). Therefore, any marketing done is aimed at making the firm make more sales and thus extra gains to the organization. Measuring the impacts on the sales funnels is also important since it shows that the marketing personnel were successful in making the prospective buyers notice the usefulness of the products. People tend to consume a new product after they have seen how important it will be to them. Therefore, increased sales for the firm producing the goods are to be registered. This metric of measuring marking effectiveness is also crucial since it covers for both the strategies implemented through internet platforms and those that do not rely on the internet. The least important of the four measure mentioned is the determining of the search engine traffic created by an advertising site for an organization. The metric complete relies on noting how much traffic is created by a search on the site without considering any other important factors that are connected to a successful marketing strategy. People get to look up something on the internet due to different reasons. It is not so certain that when something is searched in the internet it is because of its positive reputation (McDonald, 2011). Sometimes people use the search engines to look up a product they have heard some unpleasant information about. Therefore, it would be wrong to consider a marketing policy that displayed an organization in a bad way successful just because the organization’s site was being searched by many internet users. The measure is also least important since it is just a confirmation that people are searching the marketed organization or its product, but not a guarantee that more sales are to be made. Prospective buyers may be interested in knowing more about a product but the information they get might discourage them from purchasing the product. Therefore, the marketing strategy cannot be considered efficient in this case. Some of the elements that the four metrics measure tend to connect with each other in different ways. For instance, the measure of lead generations is concerned with the number of external links that are directed to an organization’s marketing site. The many links that a site is associated with in most cases are the ones that make many people search a website (McDonald, 2011). Eventually, this leads to search engine traffics referred to the site due to many people looking it up. The conversion rate is determined by noting the number of conversion forms completed. The forms are issued through links posted on the organizations website. When the links are clicked, leads are usually generated (McDonald, 2011). Therefore, there is a connection between the conversion rate and leads generation from the organization’s website. Even though it is not guaranteed, the many external links created might be a reason for an increase in online sales that a business firm makes due to an effective marketing strategy. Thus the four measures of effective marketing highlighted are all useful despite the varying importance. Reference McDonald, M. (2011). Marketing Accountability: A New Metrics Model to Measure Marketing Effectiveness. London: Kogan Page Publishers. Read More