Welcome to the first Work Media blog post of 2008. We hope everybody had a terrific New Years!

We’ve been finishing up the Work Media 2008 marketing plan and it got me thinking about something very important when it comes to marketing, and that is measurement. Even though we’re an Internet marketing firm, we will be using a number of different strategies for promoting ourselves in our local market, several of which are off-line. It would be foolish to exclude certain marketing venues just because they are not the techniques we specialize in providing.

But the question is: how do you know what combination of marketing strategies to use? There are many – search engine marketing (which we, obviously, heavily recommend), direct marketing, print advertising, TV, radio, etc. The first clue as to what methods to use is by finding out what methods are used by your most successful competitors, or similar types of businesses that are successful in your home market.

One problem is that the strategies used by your competitors may not be the same that work for your business. So ultimately what you have to do is try different things and track results as tightly as you can. You need to try and associate leads with the marketing techniques that generated those leads. A couple of ways of doing this is to use a special URL or phone number with different advertising campaigns. For instance, if you run a TV ad campaign, you might direct viewers to a URL like “www.mysite.com/TV”. Then when you check your stats, you can see how many visitors you had to the “TV” URL, which will give you a good idea how effective the campaign was.

This strategy is not perfect. In the above example, someone could type your URL without the “TV”, in which case you would not be able to make the connection. But this strategy is at least a starting point. A more accurate, but more complicated, way to measure ad campaign performance is to set up a unique phone number for different ads. Then you can tell which ads are working by how many calls come in for different phone numbers. There are a number of different companies that can help you set these phone numbers up and provide call tracking.

So when you are working out your marketing plan (you do have a marketing plan, don’t you?), please keep in mind how you are going to measure performance. Finding the right marketing mix can mean the difference between success and failure for your marketing and your business.

For help implementing a successful marketing plan for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.