Marketing plays a crucial role in the business strategy of financial advisors.
It involves things like advertising campaigns, building a strong brand, and participating in networking events. But it can be difficult to know if your marketing efforts are actually working.
Are you attracting new customers?
And which strategies give you the best return on investment?
It’s important to evaluate your current marketing activities to see if they’re effective and not just copying what your competitors are doing.
Performing a Cost-Benefit Analysis
To figure out if your marketing efforts are worth it, you need to calculate the return on investment (ROI). This means comparing the costs of your marketing with the benefits you get from it. By doing a cost-benefit analysis, you can gain valuable insights. For example, you might find that expensive ads don’t bring in much business, while a free blog attracts high-profile clients. This information can help you use your marketing budget more wisely.
One reason why companies don’t measure their marketing efforts is because they think it’s difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. But judging the success of your marketing based on vague goals can lead to wrong conclusions. Just because one ad doesn’t work doesn’t mean another ad or the same ad in a different place won’t be more effective.
Looking at the overall ROI of yearly investments in print advertisements can give you a good idea of their effectiveness. But examining the immediate business activity after a specific ad is placed can reveal surprising results. You need to carefully analyze your marketing data to understand what works and in what situations.
Measuring and Tracking Results
Before starting any marketing initiative, it’s important to define your goals and decide how you’ll measure progress. For example, if you’re running ads in newspapers, keep an eye on the number of phone calls or website visits right after the ads are published. If your company issues a press release, track press inquiries, media coverage, and any increase in phone or web traffic after the stories are published. Pay attention to changes in business activity after networking events like speeches or presentations.
Using a system to ask new or potential customers how they found out about your company can be a helpful measurement tool. You can collect this information when customers first reach out to you, place an order, or visit your website. To get a more complete picture, you can ask existing clients to fill out surveys about market research or customer satisfaction. You can send these surveys by mail with prepaid envelopes for easy responses.
Many businesses don’t spend enough on marketing and they invest even less in tracking the success of their efforts. As a result, they often underestimate the impact their campaigns can have. By dedicating time and resources to evaluating your marketing, you can make better decisions about where to allocate your budget.
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Oak & Stone offers important strategies to enhance marketing approaches for clients. We make sure resources are used effectively across different platforms to reach specific groups of people. We stay up to date with methods to track and measure marketing investments, so we can help companies thrive and achieve even more than they thought possible.
