by Tara Hornor
Making an Investment in Marketing
Are you spending money on advertising brochures for your business? If so, it is important that you begin calculating the return on investment (ROI) to find out how much your business is benefiting from them. This also helps you prioritize your marketing efforts as you’re going to want to focus your marketing dollars where they have the greatest effect.
The sole purpose of making an initial investment in a marketing method such as advertising brochures is to end up making more than that original investment. Your goal is to spread the word about your business, gain new customers, and ultimately make more money.
Calculating ROI on Your Advertising Brochures
If you have never before attempted to calculate your ROI, don’t be intimidated. By following a few fairly simple mathematical equations (nothing a small business owner can’t handle) and gathering the right information, you can become a master whiz at knowing your profits for brochures, postcards, or any other print marketing material.
Calculations
The calculation for ROI is simple: (Profit – Cost) / Cost.
So let’s apply that to a sample project. You have the following costs:
$1,000 – designing the brochures
$1,000 – 10,000 brochures
$3,000 – mailing the brochures
$5,000 – total cost
After mailing out your brochures, you start to get orders. After a few weeks you step back and calculate that your total sales for the brochure campaign were $15,000. Here’s how you would plug this data into the ROI calculation:
($15,000 – $5,000) / $5,000 = $2
So you have two dollars as the result of the calculation. What are you supposed to do with this information? The result of this calculation tells you that for every $1 you invest, you get $2 back. That’s an excellent return on investment!
Simple, right? As long as you know how to determine which of your sales actually came about as a result of your advertising brochures.
Tips on Keeping Track of ROI
Most business owners appreciate the simplicity of ROI, as it is easy to calculate. But tracking actual profits that come explicitly from a campaign can be tough. When you create advertising brochures, you should have a specific advertising campaign in place. Since you will need to find out how many sales actually came from that specific campaign, make sure you use specific methods for tracking your campaign numbers.
Some of the techniques used for tracking a specific campaign include:
- QR codes that customers scan. The code leads them to a specific landing page built specifically for your campaign.
- Special phone number that is only associated with that campaign.
- Coupon codes associated with that specific campaign.
The fact is that you probably have several marketing methods going on at any given moment for a single campaign from social media to emails to brochures. Be sure to isolate, as best you can, which is providing your profits so you can track properly. Therefore, if all of your marketing efforts are for advertising your latest product line – running shoes, let’s say – then be sure that your email leads to a different landing page than your brochures do.
As a business owner, you do not want to waste your money or your time, which is why you need to calculate ROI and track progress of the campaign on a regular basis. Once you do this, you can get a better insight into what consumers like and do not like. You will be able to figure out which brochures are working and which ones are not worth the initial investment at all.
Tara Hornor writes about marketing, advertising, branding, web and graphic design, and desktop publishing for PrintPlace.com a company that offers online printing for print marketing media. Find her on Twitter as @TaraHornor .
