For the purpose of this article, I'm not just thinking about the traditional adverts you see in newspapers and magazines, but activities such as wedding fayres too. There's a great expression when people talk about the costs of advertising, which is: "can you afford not to?" While, in principle I understand and agree to an extent, I strongly believe that you need to carefully consider any advertising you take out. How many times have you seen an advert in a newspaper and gone off to book whatever it was that was advertised? Probably not many.

I have already mentioned in the article ‘Can you afford to attend wedding fayres?’ that my golden tip is to consider how to evaluate any activity during the planning phase. And it’s worth repeating. The most important step when arranging any promotional activity is to think about what your end goal is and how you'll evaluate success before you start.

Ideally you would use evidence from previous activities to help refine your approach, although this isn't always easy when it's your first attempt at something. In a nutshell, you need to be thinking about what you want in return for spending your money. A good model for planning is the OASIS model, as this breaks down your actions nicely.


What do you want to achieve?

Audience insight:

Who are you aiming to reach? How are you going to best reach them?

Strategy/idea:

Using what you’ve learnt from above, work out a strategy to achieve your objectives.

Implementation:

Figure out how you will deliver the strategy. For example, if you’ve said you’re going to use TikTok, think about what video content you’ll need.

Scoring/evaluation:

Monitor your campaign and evaluate the results.

In marketing there's a common phrase called ROI – return on investment. You want to demonstrate the value in your marketing and show that the money spent was worthwhile. If you spend £100 on an advert that generates 100 bookings and spend £10 on a poster that generates no leads, you know to put more money behind the former. You can also evaluate why they performed differently, to inform future campaigns. Of course, in order to calculate your ROI, you also need to understand how to measure how many people saw your advert or poster and whether or not those people became leads.

Back to advertising more broadly, it can be more difficult to evaluate. But there are some tricks you can use. If you’re running an advert in a print magazine, you can create a QR code or short URL that makes it easy for people to visit your website and easy for you to track (if you make it unique, then you’ll know the visitors have come from that advert). Now you understand why some TV or social media adverts use phrases like "tv-offer" or “spring-21” in their website URLs. If your ads are running online, then tools such as bit.ly can help create trackable short links (so you know how many people clicked through). Your social media analytics or Google’s campaign URL builder can also provide data on who clicked your ads.

Whenever I include a link on social media, I either use tracking codes or run it through a service like bit.ly so that I can monitor the number of clicks. Using bit.ly I was able to provide a report showing an immediate success for a live Twitter Q&A that I had run the evening before, with one link being clicked over 70 times within 12 hours. As you can probably tell, measuring how effective an advert or activity is can be very difficult.

For those of us working in PR, it is a big subject that is often discussed and there's a shift to move away from simply reporting on the outputs (the number of tweets, views, shares etc.) to reporting on the outcomes (what did people do as a result of seeing your advert?). Sometimes, evaluating the full effect of a campaign can also be very costly. But equally, sometimes it's the little things that count for the most: for instance, comparing sales before, during and after a marketing campaign can easily show how effective it was.

There’s a great story we’re told in evaluation lessons about how the fire service used the sales of 9V batteries to show how effective their smoke alarm campaigns were. Legend has it that the sales increased during each campaign. While there’s no direct proof that the sales increase was only down to the campaign, there’s a pretty strong link between them, especially as fire alarms are one of the few household devices that use 9V batteries.
When planning any marketing activity, it's worth sitting down to think about:

In marketing there's a common phrase called ROI – return on investment. You want to demonstrate the value in your marketing and show that the money spent was worthwhile. If you spend £100 on an advert that generates 100 bookings and spend £10 on a poster that generates no leads, you know to put more money behind the former. You can also evaluate why they performed differently, to inform future campaigns. Of course, in order to calculate your ROI, you also need to understand how to measure how many people saw your advert or poster and whether or not those people became leads.

Back to advertising more broadly, it can be more difficult to evaluate. But there are some tricks you can use. If you’re running an advert in a print magazine, you can create a QR code or short URL that makes it easy for people to visit your website and easy for you to track (if you make it unique, then you’ll know the visitors have come from that advert). Now you understand why some TV or social media adverts use phrases like "tv-offer" or “spring-21” in their website URLs. If your ads are running online, then tools such as bit.ly can help create trackable short links (so you know how many people clicked through). Your social media analytics or Google’s campaign URL builder can also provide data on who clicked your ads.

Whenever I include a link on social media, I either use tracking codes or run it through a service like bit.ly so that I can monitor the number of clicks. Using bit.ly I was able to provide a report showing an immediate success for a live Twitter Q&A that I had run the evening before, with one link being clicked over 70 times within 12 hours. As you can probably tell, measuring how effective an advert or activity is can be very difficult.

For those of us working in PR, it is a big subject that is often discussed and there's a shift to move away from simply reporting on the outputs (the number of tweets, views, shares etc.) to reporting on the outcomes (what did people do as a result of seeing your advert?). Sometimes, evaluating the full effect of a campaign can also be very costly. But equally, sometimes it's the little things that count for the most: for instance, comparing sales before, during and after a marketing campaign can easily show how effective it was.

There’s a great story we’re told in evaluation lessons about how the fire service used the sales of 9V batteries to show how effective their smoke alarm campaigns were. Legend has it that the sales increased during each campaign. While there’s no direct proof that the sales increase was only down to the campaign, there’s a pretty strong link between them, especially as fire alarms are one of the few household devices that use 9V batteries.
When planning any marketing activity, it's worth sitting down to think about:

In marketing there's a common phrase called ROI – return on investment. You want to demonstrate the value in your marketing and show that the money spent was worthwhile. If you spend £100 on an advert that generates 100 bookings and spend £10 on a poster that generates no leads, you know to put more money behind the former. You can also evaluate why they performed differently, to inform future campaigns. Of course, in order to calculate your ROI, you also need to understand how to measure how many people saw your advert or poster and whether or not those people became leads.

Back to advertising more broadly, it can be more difficult to evaluate. But there are some tricks you can use. If you’re running an advert in a print magazine, you can create a QR code or short URL that makes it easy for people to visit your website and easy for you to track (if you make it unique, then you’ll know the visitors have come from that advert). Now you understand why some TV or social media adverts use phrases like "tv-offer" or “spring-21” in their website URLs. If your ads are running online, then tools such as bit.ly can help create trackable short links (so you know how many people clicked through). Your social media analytics or Google’s campaign URL builder can also provide data on who clicked your ads.

Whenever I include a link on social media, I either use tracking codes or run it through a service like bit.ly so that I can monitor the number of clicks. Using bit.ly I was able to provide a report showing an immediate success for a live Twitter Q&A that I had run the evening before, with one link being clicked over 70 times within 12 hours. As you can probably tell, measuring how effective an advert or activity is can be very difficult.

For those of us working in PR, it is a big subject that is often discussed and there's a shift to move away from simply reporting on the outputs (the number of tweets, views, shares etc.) to reporting on the outcomes (what did people do as a result of seeing your advert?). Sometimes, evaluating the full effect of a campaign can also be very costly. But equally, sometimes it's the little things that count for the most: for instance, comparing sales before, during and after a marketing campaign can easily show how effective it was.

There’s a great story we’re told in evaluation lessons about how the fire service used the sales of 9V batteries to show how effective their smoke alarm campaigns were. Legend has it that the sales increased during each campaign. While there’s no direct proof that the sales increase was only down to the campaign, there’s a pretty strong link between them, especially as fire alarms are one of the few household devices that use 9V batteries.
When planning any marketing activity, it's worth sitting down to think about:

In marketing there's a common phrase called ROI – return on investment. You want to demonstrate the value in your marketing and show that the money spent was worthwhile. If you spend £100 on an advert that generates 100 bookings and spend £10 on a poster that generates no leads, you know to put more money behind the former. You can also evaluate why they performed differently, to inform future campaigns. Of course, in order to calculate your ROI, you also need to understand how to measure how many people saw your advert or poster and whether or not those people became leads.

Back to advertising more broadly, it can be more difficult to evaluate. But there are some tricks you can use. If you’re running an advert in a print magazine, you can create a QR code or short URL that makes it easy for people to visit your website and easy for you to track (if you make it unique, then you’ll know the visitors have come from that advert). Now you understand why some TV or social media adverts use phrases like "tv-offer" or “spring-21” in their website URLs. If your ads are running online, then tools such as bit.ly can help create trackable short links (so you know how many people clicked through). Your social media analytics or Google’s campaign URL builder can also provide data on who clicked your ads.

Whenever I include a link on social media, I either use tracking codes or run it through a service like bit.ly so that I can monitor the number of clicks. Using bit.ly I was able to provide a report showing an immediate success for a live Twitter Q&A that I had run the evening before, with one link being clicked over 70 times within 12 hours. As you can probably tell, measuring how effective an advert or activity is can be very difficult.

For those of us working in PR, it is a big subject that is often discussed and there's a shift to move away from simply reporting on the outputs (the number of tweets, views, shares etc.) to reporting on the outcomes (what did people do as a result of seeing your advert?). Sometimes, evaluating the full effect of a campaign can also be very costly. But equally, sometimes it's the little things that count for the most: for instance, comparing sales before, during and after a marketing campaign can easily show how effective it was.

There’s a great story we’re told in evaluation lessons about how the fire service used the sales of 9V batteries to show how effective their smoke alarm campaigns were. Legend has it that the sales increased during each campaign. While there’s no direct proof that the sales increase was only down to the campaign, there’s a pretty strong link between them, especially as fire alarms are one of the few household devices that use 9V batteries.

WHEN PLANNING ANY MARKETING ACTIVITY, IT'S WORTH SITTING DOWN TO THINK ABOUT: