The number of variables which form an inherent part of the world of marketing and advertising online can often act as a cushion for mediocrity. If you think about it carefully you’ll see it for what it is as far as online marketing agencies go – you essentially just pay them to implement some marketing and advertising strategies which may or may not yield a favourable result. If that is indeed the case then why not learn those marketing strategies yourself and go direct to market with them?

Even the biggest advertising business in the world, Google, does this with their AdWords offering. Whenever you’re trying to put a campaign together, you get an estimate of how your budget will perform. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but at times this marketing and advertising model can prove to be very expensive, especially if you analyse the bottom line – the sales conversions. An expensive marketing campaign designed and implemented by top marketing professionals is no good to you if all it turned out to be was an expensive experiment.

How can you make sure every last penny you spend on your marketing and advertising does its fair share of work for your company or business though?

Define your core target market

When marketing agencies report back on the results of a campaign they’ve been running for you, for which you undoubtedly had to pay upfront, it can be very easy to get lost in the numbers they present to you. For example, if you boost one of your posts on Facebook and your intent was to send targeted traffic to an opt-in page or a sales page, what Facebook reports back to you is how many people your boosted post reached.

Does it matter if 35,997 were “reached” by your ad if not a single one of those people completed the purchase on the offer you were advertising? No it doesn’t and this resembles the act of trying to sell bikinis to the Inuit. Your marketing campaigns are way too broad in their targeting of potential buyers and yet you’re offering a very specific product or service.

Yes, sometimes there’s great value to be had if you target some spill-over markets as there are indeed many cases in which someone walks into a store looking to buy a newspaper for example and they find themselves walking out having picked up a pack of cigarettes and perhaps a lottery ticket in addition their newspaper.

So define your core market and then build around that core market with the targeting of your marketing campaigns.

Do your own quality control

Clients who get the most out of the marketing services they buy from marketing and advertising agencies are those who know what they’re talking about and those who deploy some of their own quality-control tools to gauge the performance of each of the campaigns run for them. Something like Google’s Analytics platform for example makes for a great tool to use in monitoring the traffic that hits your site and the best part of all is that it’s completely free to use.

This way you can quite easily and accurately tell if the big numbers the ad agencies show you aren’t in fact as a result of merely trying to sell bikinis to the Inuit…