The hardest thing when embarking on any marketing campaign is knowing that your dollars are effectively spent. This includes everything from advertising on T.V, on the Radio, in the newspaper and of course when handing out corporate gifts and promotional items. To use a technical term Return on Investment or (ROI) for short is extremely hard to guage. For example how can you adequetely attribute to your 10% increase in sales as directly caused by an advertising campaign that you ran for 2 months in a magazine? Or conversely what if that campaign coincided with a 10% decline in sales? Was it because the advertisement turned customers off your product or did the advertising campaign actually help minimize what otherwise would have been a 20% decline?

This has always been a huge question for any business wanting to promote its business or services. The only thing that most will agree on is that spending money on marketing is an absolute neccessity to survive. So is there anyway at all to guage the effectiveness of your expenditure on things like ads and promotional items? I mean its all too easy to simply come up with the conclusion that your marketing dollars are going nowhere and that no new sales were generated from it. However have you considered that maybe:

1) An existing customer has placed a re-order or engaged in your service again because they were simply reminded of your brand (and reminded of their previous experience) by simply seeing your logo in a newspaper or a promotional toy that was lying around.

2) A customer that came out of the blue to buy your product. Was it in direct reply to your advertisment or would they have made the purchase anyway?

3) Can you explain the sudden jump in your website visits? Or perhaps Social Media interaction and Likes?

If not then assuming you cannot appropriately ask why or where they heard about you and your brand then perhaps it is not that much of a stretch to assume that the sale or interest was a direct result of your marketing and promotional product placement advertising.

Of course there are many other tools that you can use to at the very least estimate how your advertising is going. Some examples include

- Fund Raising: If its for a charity then this is extremely easy. Simply deduct your sales from the cost of product purchased and you have a precise estimate on your ROI.

- Statistics & Numbers: Everything is documented nowadays. Number of T.V viewers for a program! Circulation stats for magazines and newspapers, number of attendees at prior year tradeshows and more. Use these to your advantage and you can realistically predict the number of people that are exposed to your brand.

- Simply ask for feedback. It can be verbally or formally on a form. Have your team members document it. This may be quite hard for many businesses though as it is not ergonomically possible.

Spending on marketing is hard! Last month we spent big to have a tradeshow booth. We gave out heaps of promotional items such as promotional yoyos, printed sticky note pads, stressballs of course combined with the cost of renting the space and decorating it cost us quite a bit. Have we got our money back? - Nope
Will we be back next year? - Absolutely!
Why? - Based on a number of different criterias. Here is why

There were 4500 attendees
All our promotional products were distributed to literally every passerby
The demographic and types of guests was perfect
Brand exposure and having our brand name on their mind (+ the cool little gift we handed out) was high
Will we ever be able to guage the success of this marketing expenditure precisely? Nope

Is it a gut feeling that it was successful as opposed to solid empirical data? Nope

So much like any marketing campaign it is a guidance only that we can use to confirm if advertising and ROI is successful.