As we continue to develop new ways to get our products and services to end users, identifying whether or not you are going down or up when it comes to marketing is an important question to consider. While it is easy to say that you have built a marketing campaign that involves Twitter and Facebook and that you also have a PR team that sends out press releases, it means nothing unless it all funnels back to the idea of moving forward and improving your brands value.

Signs You Are Moving Forward

As mentioned, moving forward involves improving your brands value. While this may seem like a broad concept, we can help narrow it down by looking for these 3 characteristics:

1. Brand Reach

One way to determine if your marketing efforts are going up or down is to look at how the your marketing campaign affects your brands ‘reach.’ By this I am referring to its ability to interest users outside your expected market. Simply put, if your product is geared toward market A, but your marketing campaign attracts market A and B, then you have essentially increased your brands reach.

2. Say It Once

Another way to assess the progress of your marketing campaigns is to see how the average Joe sees it. If you have to explain it to them more than two times then you know what you are doing can be better. Remember that the average consumer or average Joe doesn’t want to spend a long time trying to connect the dots. Simplicity isn’t a bad thing.

3. How Long Before It’s Boring

Another determinant in figuring out if your marketing is going up or down is to consider how long your marketing campaign can go before people start to get bored with it. For example, if you are building a campaign focused around a video blog, but after the first episode you don’t have the urge to watch another, this should be a huge red flag. Remember that campaigns that are propelling the brand and its products are the ones that a couple months down the line won’t be considered boring and overplayed.

More Isn’t better

One instinct of many marketers when they see that their marketing campaign isn’t working is to do more. While this is obviously a reasonable instinct, consumers don’t necessarily want that. As consumers continue to gain momentum in shaping the success of a product or service, the last thing a brand wants to do is to bombard them which would end up turning them away.

Rather, a better approach is to tailor a marketing campaign to work more efficiently. In a market where anyone can send a Twitter update or post something to their Facebook wall, efficiency can be the difference between relevance and being invisible.

Joseph is the Director of Marketing at Viralogy.com & works in social media & sports consulting. Read more about him at http://JosephAYi.com

Tags: Campaigns, Efficiency, Social Media