Evaluating Your Marketing Activity
Mark S. Elliott has spent 25 years working in various management roles within the tenanted and leased divisions of the UK's largest breweries and pub companies. His extensive knowledge and day-to-day involvement with pubs and publicans make him well qualified to know what is required to run a successful pub. He shares his knowledge and many 'insider tips' with you in this book. Mark is based in Cockermouth, Cumbria.
EVALUATING YOUR MARKETING ACTIVITY
Blindly spending money on a particular way of communicating month by month, without evaluating whether it is working is akin to throwing money down the drain. Unfortunately, many pubs do just that. They unthinkingly commit to 12 months’ paid advertising in the local newspaper because it seems to be a good idea or because their competitors are doing it too. They make no attempt to assess whether their advertising is working. Then they repeat the process again the following year, simply because they did it before!
Evaluating your marketing activity is by no means an exact science; it can sometimes be difficult to work out what impact it has had on your business. However, making an attempt to find a correlation between your sales figures and your marketing activity is better than not doing so and simply hoping for the best. Checking your weekly sales before, during and after any marketing activity is useful, so too is obtaining feedback from your customers. As you build up your sales information over several months, you will become aware of trends and seasonal fluctuations.
Evaluation is made much easier if your marketing activity incorporates a voucher to be redeemed by the customer. For example, ‘claim a free glass of wine with each meal’ etc. This allows you to quantify the response you get and also capture useful customer information that can be used for future marketing activity.
Evaluating your marketing activity helps you to ascertain what works and what does not. Spend time and money on what works and drop what does not. Doing so will stop you from wasting money and improve the effectiveness of your marketing.
