What makes marketing activity effective?

What makes marketing activity effective?

I think that marketing is a really important key to opening up the sales door for my yummy sauces. I regularly do food tasting sessions at the shops where they sell my products.

It's time, however, to up my game and analyse the return on investment of all of my marketing activities. This is another tricky task for a novice like me: do I know how to measure the effectiveness of a marketing event and the get figures to quantify? Er, I think you know the answer.

Take last Saturday, for example. I had discussed the idea of having a Mariachi band at the Food Halls with Selfridges . It turned into reality on Sat 31 January and we had such a good time, which is clearly a good thing. These are some benefits from this tasting session:

• The event was nicely publicised on the Selfridges website for three weeks and was advertised on their newsletter.
• People tried the sauces, enjoyed the music and bought my products.
• They took photos and videos which will hopefully remind them of the brand and create awareness. Does this = sales?

Two videos taken were particularly interesting:

• one was for a blog for the daddydonkey website. They sell Mexican food from a van in London, have had some rave reviews and have lots of followers.
• The other was taken by a man whose daughter the Mariachi band and I (!) sang a Mexican birthday song for. This will be posted on his blog.

This is where I reach my limits as I don't know how to quantify whether the event was good ROI. How do I measure this? It's not straightforward. On the day, we saw 300+ people and I will get the sales figures next week.

This is what we spent:

• The Mariachi band fees.
• The time of three adults, including me, my lovely husband and volunteer Rosie - thank you Rosie!
• We paid for  four return train fares from Derby. The tickets were cheap as we used a family railway card (the kids came with us, which could've been a good plan but they were a real pain as they were tired from a busy week, but that's another matter!).
• Samples, tortilla chips.
• Subsistence costs: meal, drinks etc.

To summarise, I think that the event was worthwhile: we sold, created awareness, and have been/will be on other websites. However, this is only my gut feeling and I need to take the guesswork out of investing on marketing to focus my very limited resources wisely. Do leave me a comment if you have any suggestions.

You can find out more about Marcela on the new interactive business website www.inafishbowl.com

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