Marketing materials are what drive consumers to your business, but are they doing their job? Without knowing the effectiveness of your marketing materials there is no way of knowing if they are worth the resources to produce.
Knowing if they work as a whole is one thing but know what works in particular is another. What do I mean by that? It’s important to know if using marketing collateral at all is worth it, but once you realize it is and does boost sales, you need to pinpoint which pieces are really the force driving those sales.
There are a few tricks you can do to measure the effectiveness of your marketing materials.
Talk to your Sales and Marketing Teams
They are the ones that interact with collateral day in and day out. They should be able to tell you which pieces have worked well for them in the past. They may be able to suggest certain formats for different situations. An introductory meeting may call for one form of collateral while a meeting with a long time client may need a different format or style.
Take these suggestions seriously, and if your team members don’t know right away allow them to experiment with different marketing materials, while stressing that this is something they should be tracking for the future.
Use Digital Metrics to Track Print Assets
Sounds impossible right? It isn’t. One of the things your business can do is include what is called a PURL (personalized URL). Essentially you can customize links in accordance with the people that will interact with them.
For example, if at Velocity we wanted to measure the effectiveness of a blue postcard versus an orange post card we can include a PURL specific to each card’s intended recipient and track who used the link.
One way to do this is to include the person’s name in the link so it may look like this:
velocityprint.com/JSmith
Each recipient’s initial of their first name followed by their last name would appear at the end of the link. If a recipient uses to the link, the program tracking website traffic would be able to determine who went to the website thanks to the personalization added to the link.
Therefore, if 20 out of 100 blue post cards received link traffic and only 5 out of 100 of the orange received traffic, you may then determine that blue post cards are more effective.
This is just one example. You can run this kind of test on all types of marketing materials and all styles. Especially if the programs are already in place to track this kind of data on your website, then the process for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing material becomes very easy.