Twitter® Marketing For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Measuring the Success of Your Marketing Plan

In This Chapter

• Figuring out whether your marketing efforts are successful

• Working to build your influence on Twitter

• Striking the right balance with others on Twitter

Back in the old days of traditional media (about ten years ago), it was a footloose, carefree time. Marketing budgets were big and usually contained totals like "$????.??" or "whatever we can get," ad buys were huge, and marketers really didn't know if their ads were working.

"We're building mind share," the marketers would say. "You can't measure mind share." And then they would snicker knowingly amongst themselves, and other departments could never be sure whether they were being totally honest.

The mind share argument is one that a lot of marketers fell back on when a campaign didn't meet expectations. "At least the campaign built mind share," they would say. This was another way of saying, "The campaign helped create consumer awareness."

After a while, organizations started to hold marketers accountable for their wild spending, and so those marketers had to measure whether total sales went up after a particular campaign. If sales went up, the campaign was a success. If they didn't, it was a failure.

But marketers couldn't directly attribute a specific market, a specific commercial, or a specific time of day to a specific sale. Did the TV commercial result in that bump in sales, or was it the billboard ads? Did the radio campaign outperform the direct mail? And which ...