Evaluating the effectiveness of your communication

Once your advertising campaign has been launched, you must be able to evaluate whether it has produced the expected results. And there are tools to help you do this.

It is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. This makes it possible to avoid making the same mistakes or simply improve certain aspects of your public relations policy. If you notice, for example, that use of social networks has not reached the customers you were targeting, adjustments will be made, focusing on traditional advertising channels such as newspapers or television.

For more specific information about the impact of a campaign, you can contact the advertising agency that produced the campaign. Most agencies have evaluation tools.

Letters and newsletters

It is relatively easy to calculate the effectiveness of letters and newsletters. You simply count the number of responses received. In general terms, the success rate of this method is:

  • For purchased address lists: approximately 0.5% to 2%
  • For an SME’s existing customers, for a new promotion: approximately 2% to 10%
  • For an SME’s existing customers, for an invitation to a special event: over 10%

Posters

APG SGA uses the “post-testing” method for its advertising posters, which means it can ascertain the impact of each of the posters it has been asked to produce. For example, 61% of passers-by remembered a Denner advertising campaign in 2013, which showed wide-eyed customers with the slogan “Amazing eye-opening prices”. Another example: 51% of passers-by remembered an ad for M-Budget that simply showed items on promotion.

On the web

With advertising space tools on the internet like Google AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter, the effectiveness of online advertising can be calculated by number of clicks. Social networks also allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your online activity. For example, a Facebook page shows the number of people who have seen the user’s profile or who have watched a video or viewed an article.

Sources: Small Business Marketing Kit for Dummies, Barbara Findlay Schenck, John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2012; APG SGA, Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Facebook.



Last modification 16.02.2020

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