If you pick a random marketer and ask him or her for a good way of getting your product sold, there is a good chance that the marketer will tell you that if you put some marketing promotions into place then your product will probably be more attractive to customers. The fact is that your product is perhaps not very unique on its own. That is to say, there are surely other firms selling a similar type of product or service and since that is true, you need something that makes your brand name stand out. Marketing promotions are one way in which businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors.
It would be a safe assumption to make that most businesses would have put some marketing promotion or the other into place. Most businesses do not have the luxury of sitting back and doing nothing and having clients come to them. As mentioned above, the competition factor ensures that marketers have to do something so as to get noticed by their target market.
But, at the same time, not all businesses that have marketing promotions also take the time and effort to evaluate the success of these promotions. Without evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing campaign there is no way of knowing if all your marketing activities are getting you results or are merely just a waste of time and money.
It is true that measuring how successful you have been with various marketing campaigns is not an easy task, but it is definitely an essential one. The goal of your marketing promotions do not necessarily have to be increased sales so it is not as easy as looking at your sales targets and seeing if they have been achieved. There is much more to evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing promotions than just looking at if your revenues have gone up, down or stayed the same.
There are a number of ways of evaluating your marketing promotions and how you do it will depend a lot on what your campaign is all about. As mentioned above, perhaps your promotion has nothing to do with sales at all; it could be about generating interest or increasing brand awareness. One fairly common way of measuring the effectiveness of a marketing promotion is by the method of coding. It is not as simple as a "sale" being a success and a "non sale" being a failure. There are areas in between, for example, a customer might be interested in the product but unable to buy it at the moment for some reason. Such a situation is not a complete failure of the promotion because you have still managed to capture the interest of the client. You can assign codes to each kind of reaction (sale, non-sale, interested, etc) that customers show and see how effective your promotions have been. The point to keep in mind is that it is not a black and white case of "sold" and "not sold".
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Understanding the importance of having frequent evaluation of marketing promotions is essential. Marketers might be more than excited to put promotions into place with the hope that it will lead to heightened sales, but the whole cycle is not complete until the promotion is evaluated for success, failure or something in between.
