While it’s perhaps impossible to track and gauge the full impact of every single cent spent on your marketing and advertising, an effort still needs to be made to implement that strategy pragmatically. If you don’t keep tabs on the impact of your marketing and advertising efforts and expenditure it can get very easy for there to be a cash-leak that gets harder and harder to locate.

In an age where a lot of one’s marketing and advertising efforts follow more of a wait-and-see terrace, it can definitely make for a serious challenge trying to put a value on every bit of marketing and advertising implemented. It has to be done though, even if your particular marketing strategy leans a little heavier on the digital approach. Pragmatism has to reign supreme. Advertising in this day and age is a necessity, it is the way that businesses reach their audience and that comes in many different ways, so many ways in fact that there is a need for accurate analytics (go right here) for certain areas such as TV and digital frequencies so businesses get the best possible outcomes from their research and do not spend extreme amounts to find it.

Marketing spend versus profits

If you’re lucky enough to be involved in a business which deals in sales units that can be measured precisely in number, turnover and profit, your job here is that much easier. Take full advantage of your ability to put exact figures on your marketing spend versus the subsequent profits which result from that expenditure. For example, if you put an advert in the newspaper for a certain amount of money, you would probably need to include some sort of voucher redemption code with the ad so that you can then match the subsequent sales that come in with that specific ad. The final step then is to simply work out how much you had to spend on the advertising campaign to make the subsequent profit.

Scenarios such as these make scalability that much easier.

Broader marketing spend versus profits

Not all businesses deal in offerings whose sales can be tracked to a specific marketing campaign though, such as how attending a networking event could have led to your business card being picked up by someone who passes it on to someone else who’s interested in your business and perhaps goes on to place a large order. Similar is the case for a service-based company. Let’s take the instance of a law company, particularly a personal injury law firm to understand this in more detail. Apparently, a person will only need the assistance of personal injury lawyers when he or his close one has met an accident. But when he searches online, he is most likely to trust the firm whose name he has seen several times before. This means the efforts of a personal injury law marketing service comes to fruition at this stage. In broad terms, each impression of the ad did count and it is the collective effort that helped the firm gain the trust of the potential customer. In this case it’s about looking at the costs associated with the broader marketing efforts and taking that total into account when weighing it up against the subsequent turnover and profits.

Marketing spend versus value-gain

There are times when your marketing and advertising efforts are not necessarily aimed at boosting immediate sales, but in this case one still needs to be pragmatic about the implementation of these marketing efforts. For example, you may use indoor LED video wall displays at your store to provide more information about your offerings to customers. While this may not be directly aimed at selling a product, it still offers value to the consumer and consequently, to your business. This can be translated into virtually any marketing effort you put in. Measure the value gained out of it, for example, a certain campaign could draw a certain number of daily active users to your website – something which can be turned into tangible value.

Tweaking, scaling and optimization

If you’re a little bit more pragmatic about your marketing and advertising, paying special attention to the cause (how much you spend) and effect (how much value/profits result from the campaign), increasing your bottom line can be a simple matter of scaling your budget, tweaking your strategy and optimizing your approach.

If a certain demographic converts at a rate of 50% for example, pragmatic marketing practices would dictate that you focus more on reaching more of that demographic.