RACE Part 5: Skip the Evaluation?

Research, Action, Communication, Evaluation

Skipping the Evaluation segment of the RACE is like climbing the mountain and turning back ten steps from the top. Why would you hike that far and turn around before taking in the view?

Several years ago, I helped launch an ad campaign for a prominent outdoor footwear brand. Our first venture into big-time advertising was a television ad campaign that blanketed TNN and ESPN. Since the web wasn’t an option—yes, it was that long ago—we marked the spot with a unique and easy-to-remember toll-free phone number. Even though all of this happened ages ago, the lesson I learned from it still sticks with me to this day. Our initial research told us that ESPN was dramatically bigger and “better” for our brand, but after analyzing the call logs, the exact opposite was proven. Even though TNN was the smaller niche station, we received an overwhelming response of calls and catalog requests, whereas the much larger ESPN offered very little brand engagement.

Back then, it was a bit tougher to evaluate our campaigns, but the good news is that evaluating your campaign is becoming easier and easier with today’s technologies. There are a multitude of free tools out there to measure effectiveness. Every ad that I send out now has a quick response code or unique URL that can be easily tracked via Google Analytics. We can see the performance of our social media campaigns with a free tools built into our ad platform and organic software . We even still send snail mailers to trade show attendees with a call-to-action that drives them to our booth. All of these lead to some type of qualitative or quantitative information that provides valuable insights for future endeavors.

The end result? By evaluating all of your hard work, you’ll be able to walk into the next year with a confidence of where you should allocate your budget dollars. And yes, the following year, we did increase our buy with TNN.