Key Marketing Strategy - Measuring The Sales Results Of Each Promotion

The Importance of Tracking Your Marketing Results

Whether you are managing a local retailers, operating a MLM business or any kind of online business, then you need to be critically aware of how efficient your marketing methods are. That is, how many sales are resulting from each promotional activity you are engaging in? Further, then measure the revenue of each of those sales against your marketing spend used to achieve them.

The habit of measuring your results is a key marketing skill to develop. For it is only by knowing what kinds of results a given marketing effort produces, that will allow you to determine whether or not to use it again. And, in addition to this, what potentially you can do in order to improve your promotion, so that it becomes even more effective next time.

To be a profitable online marketer, you should never even consider running a pay-per-click ad or executing an email campaign or classified advertising promotion without having some type of response mechanism in place to measure the sales results.

Now it will depend on the volume of activity you are generating as to how sophisticated you need to be. But bear in mind, it does not have to be complicated, a simple tracking system is often the best way to manage this process and the easiest to interpret the results from.

If you are in a 2 Up, Network Marketing or MLM type of business activity remember: You are not there to promote the Corporate Brand. Your job is to generate personal sales, and in turn, teach your down-line how to do the same. Unfortunately, Corporate Brand promotion is all that much of the advertising you see in magazines, the internet and TV are doing - nobody measures the sales resulting from these glossy and expensive ads. Do not fall into this trap.

Each of your promotions must have a definite, targeted purpose. And each promotion must be measured to see that it does accomplish that purpose.

Recording Your Promotions

A simple system can be put in place with modern computers, without much computer knowledge beyond that of simple text processing:

1. Keep a record of each promotion you create, by type.

For instance, Google ads, email campaigns, free promotions, paid / free advertising etc.

2. Each promotion has a simple code.

Give each promotion a simple code, so its results can be tracked.

For instance: GA2008May.

3. Record the results.

Typically, you will record the following type of data, and naturally you will fine tune this to the particular promotion type.

• Promotion Code:
• Target Market:
• Volume or Budget:
• Responses:
• Cost of Promotion:
• Revenue Generated:
• Net Profit or Loss:
• Percentage Profit or Loss:
• Comments:

As you can see, this is not really that complicated, and it will pay for itself over and over again, with regular use.

Reaping the Rewards

You are now in the driving seat. You now know what promotions are making you money, what's breaking even and, of course, which are losing you money.

Also bear in mind that just because a promotion did not make a huge profit or get as big a response as you would have liked, is not necessarily a reason reject it completely. Sometimes a little fine tuning can turn a mediocre promotion into a real winner.

Do you see the business benefits of doing this? By having a promotion record and the results it produced in a single folder on your computer, it makes developing your next promotion so much easier. No more guessing, or trying and hoping.

Over time, this system will also give you a 'feel' for where the market place is going, and it will give you an early warning of any trend changes.

Plus, plus, plus for those of you into Network Marketing / MLM businesses, this is very easy to teach to your down-line who are serious about developing their home based business.

Next Steps

This is just one important step in becoming a master marketer in your given business area. To learn more about how to be an accomplished online marketer, and boost your sales, please visit my website now.