With the beginning another year, this is a great time to think about the effectiveness and measurement of your marketing programs. Of course, all marketers aim to introduce and execute upon effective marketing programs, but what determines efficacy and how is it measured? The key lies in goal setting – realistic goals that contribute to a broader marketing aim or contribute to a corporate strategy. For example, if your goal is to introduce a new advertising campaign to support a product introduction, you will want to make sure to clearly define the campaign’s objectives – raise awareness of the product’s existence; motivate your targets to download a trial; redirect them to a website or unique campaign URL, etc.

Whatever the objective, make sure you rely on measurement to help gauge effectiveness and, beyond this, be realistic about what ultimately determines this. Again, an example: Let’s say you roll out a new document management software program and will rely on advertising solely to support the new product’s brand (identity). So, you don’t expect new sales or leads, but hope, by the end of the campaign, people will talk about your product and recognize it (and what it is and does) without a full-on sales pitch. OK, well how would you go about measuring your success in achieving this? The answer is one that most marketers hate to hear – you’ll need to spend money upfront and on the back-end in order to better understand what people think of your product.  You must measure before the campaign, during, and after to truly know “what moves the needle"? To what extent has your ad moved the needle from being just another DM product to being DocuWorld 2000 – the most affordable, full-featured, web-based DMS for IP boutiques?