Morgan
says: Let’s say you are the owner of a company that makes denim
fabric. Business is booming and your orders exceed your current ability
to produce denim. You want to purchase a new weaving machine to turn your
inventory of cotton threads into denim. You have to decide what machine
to buy. One of the many things you will consider is: how quickly will
this machine produce enough denim to justify the expense of its purchase?
In other words, how quickly will I see a return on my investment in a new
machine?
Without over complicating this scenario with business
accounting and finance considerations, it is relatively easy to see the
connection between a piece of machinery and how much product it produces.
Calculating ROI for your
marketing expenses, isn’t always so straight forward. The Holy Grail for
a marketing professional would be the ability to directly correlate sales to an
advertisement, promotional piece, contest, or giveaway. At present, it is
difficult to validate in hard data what marketing process works best to justify
the expense and this is what our whole platform is about, turning myths
into simple tips authors can do for FREE.
The primary example is our web
address. Yes, we own the domain and our web address could be athormarketing101.com but
we’ve kept the .blogspot. for now because that is free. The template is a standard
one with a different color for the banner. Everything else about our site is
standard, free, and really easy to maintain and promote.
Therese
says: I was highly amused to see a ploy in process to generate a tangible
ROI by Michael Hyatt.
He’s announced more than once that his marketing book PLATFORM is
available for purchase but he doesn’t want anyone to buy it – yet. He is using
his own platform to withhold sales until this week (5/21/12) in hope the surge
will be enough to land him on the NY Times Bestseller list. I applaud his
efforts and hope he succeeds.
I’ve followed Mr. Hyatt’s blog since he was CEO of Thomas
Nelson Publishers, a few years ago. He posted daily, refined his platform into LEADERSHIP, and has incorporated a
variety of electronic gadgets and processes into his web presence. He’s now an
international motivational speaker and has thousands of followers that may
multiply daily. If he succeeds and hits The List – he will have hard ROI data
regarding his marketing platform to generate sales of his book. All his years
of dedication to his career, platform, promotions, and building his distribution lists, could land him on the bestseller list this week, by his own design.
[Update 6/2/2012 - Mr. Hyatt announced his book hit FIVE bestseller lists ]This in no way assures his example of building a platform is a book of value to novelists. The Return on Investment would not be measurable until you gained enough exposure through best-selling novels. Then you could try to turn that success into an agenda in hopes your fans will hop on your platform.
In upcoming posts, we will explore some ways to try to
measure the success of your marketing efforts.
Any marketing questions can be posed in the comments on any post. If you have a question, others will too, so we can address our answers to all. Our posts are myths and tips we feel are needed for us to share but we would love to target our answers to specific questions.
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