The most essential ingredient of any successful business is an effective Marketing Bridge. If you are unfamiliar with the term, “Marketing Bridge” refers to all the forces that combine to make a sale and create a customer for your enterprise. Every business has one. Most don’t even realize it. Some are in good shape. Some are in need of major repair and reconstruction. The inventor, designer, and creator of the Marketing Bridge, Norton E. Warner, also happens to be the founder of Marketing Firepower.
I learned long ago as a curious little rug rat that you can’t see electricity, but one quick insertion of a screwdriver into a wall outlet will generate instant pain and probably knock you into next week. That happened to me about 40 years before the invention of the Taser and the now popular phrase, “Don’t tase me, bro,” but I think I have a pretty good idea of what a Taser feels like. That’s where I learned the valuable lesson that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s like gravity. You can’t see it, but you experience the results every moment of your life.
Advertising and marketing are much different. You can see advertising. You can hear advertising. In many cases you can even touch advertising. But in most cases, it’s extremely difficult to precisely measure the results of advertising.
The take-out pizza restaurant can count the number of $1.00-off coupons redeemed from their most recent newspaper ad, mailer, email blast, val-pak, etc. It’s easy to measure the results of an advertised item over a period of time at a particular price. In this case, they count the number of coupons presented. However, it is impossible to measure the impact on the consumer that did not take advantage of the coupon offer.
You can measure the number of people who walk into your store each month. You can count the number of phone inquiries you receive. But when you try to measure results by the number of sales transacted, you are measuring incorrectly. I’ll explain.
One of my very first advertising clients was an owner of an outdoor equipment sales and service shop. He spent a lot of money every month on advertising. He sold a lot of lawn mowers and snow blowers. He offered factory-authorized service. He had a very modern showroom with a great selection and items properly marked. He sold more machines and handled more repairs than any of his local competitors. Within a few years, he had grown from a tiny gas-station size store to two big locations. But, he could have been even more successful.
So often when a customer would walk in and attempt to buy a replacement part…..well, let’s just say his personal selling skills were not always razor-sharp. He would become upset if the customer did not have the model number of the snow blower for which he needed the part. He would shake his head in disgust if she didn’t come in with the serial number from the deck of the lawn mower. And he would become incensed if the customer didn’t even know where they purchased the equipment. I witnessed these battles with customers more than I care to remember. Most of the time, the customer would walk out in a huff. No sale.
Shortly after one of these encounters, I asked the owner why he spent money with me on advertising. He looked at me with that ‘what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about?’ look. I told him he was wasting his money because for every one customer I brought into the store through effective advertising, his argumentative behavior was chasing away more money in lost sales than I could ever be expected to bring in. I reminded him that for every customer who left angry, there would be somewhere between 100 and 1000 potential customers who would never show their face inside his store – all thanks to negative word of mouth from one unhappy customer.
And now you have somewhat of an understanding of the complexity of measuring the effectiveness of advertising. The advertising did its job. It communicated the proper message to cause a consumer to stop in his store. The consumer gave the owner every opportunity to be sold. But a lackluster employee, or in this case the owner, often prevented the sale from taking place.
Start paying attention to this wherever you go. It happens in restaurants with surly waiters who fail to treat customers with the service they expect. It happens in department stores when the person at the register is too busy chit-chatting with another employee instead of offering their undivided attention and gratitude to the shopper buying the goods. It happens when the service company you’re dealing with fails to return your phone call.
Here’s something to think about when you try to measure your advertising effectiveness. If the number of customers is high and the average sale is low, the advertising is working but the store isn’t. When the number of customers is low and the average sale is high, the store is working but the advertising isn’t. The two components – effective advertising and effective personal selling must work together for any business to succeed and prosper.
If you want advertising to really pay off for you, take a good, hard, critical look at every component of your Marketing Bridge. Make certain it’s in the best possible shape. It may still be difficult to measure the effectiveness of your advertising…but you are certain to see the results.
Van is vice president of Marketing Firepower with decades of experience in helping small business succeed through the effective use of advertising.
