Nowadays, advertising is necessary for any company, although before it is applied as a strategy, some questions arise regarding this topic, and one of them is: is advertising an expense or an investment?

Well, many entrepreneurs have realized that allocating a monthly budget for promotion is necessary, however, this is where the question arises: how to determine its results? And this is when the objective of said marketing plan must be created.

Step by step in digital marketing

First, let's think about the purpose of the money to invest, that is, will we focus on getting a greater reach, increasing the number of followers, increasing sales, getting new clients, generating awareness, among others. But, regardless of what you aim for, keep in mind that, without a clear objective, we will lose money.

Some people think that being part of the digital world is an expense because it is difficult for them to establish whether their efforts are yielding results or to what extent they are being effective for their business.

But they ignore the great advantages that there are, such as more people knowing about the products or services you sell and this will attract new customers, and at the same time, it is possible to learn specific aspects that are useful for the growth of their company.

So before you start paying for advertising, be clear about your goals. Most people immediately think of increasing sales, but there are other goals, such as brand recognition or customer loyalty, or even improving your reputation. These are aspects that can, therefore, increase your income more efficiently.

Remember that goals will allow you to establish concrete and coherent actions to achieve them.

Profitable marketing

If we know that we want to increase sales, the first questions to be answered are: how and where will they be closed? Let's start with the communication channel to be used, that is, choosing whether it will be printed material; traditional media (radio, television, press); the Internet, or a combination.

As we see today, society is immersed in cyberspace, which can be divided between the well-known social networks, search engines, websites, emails, video channels, among others. Here it is time to stop and think: which of all these channels would give the best results, according to my business?

However, it is necessary to carry out tests, not based on assumptions, but on data to corroborate them, but if there is no budget to experiment, we can carry out analyses and trend studies.

And then, optimizing advertising campaigns according to the figures in the reports, and if in the case that the strategy does not give the expected results, it does not mean that advertising is useless, but rather that it is necessary to try new ways to achieve the stated goals, and the data can be of great help.

But what is experimentation in marketing?

In technical terms, it is about putting forward a hypothesis, designing the information collection process and verifying whether it complies with the initial hypothesis. As an example, we can say that if we want to increase sales by 10% with an investment of X value, through social media campaigns, it is necessary to be clear about how we will measure this increase associated with advertising.

Subsequently, if the result is 10% or more, it means that it was successful, but if sales increased below that value, it is necessary to reevaluate the strategy and this is where feedback plays a fundamental role.

Why would the goal not be achieved?

There are several reasons, one of them could be that the budget invested was too low, another that the advertising did not reach the right client, three that social networks were not the right channel, but search engines, and so on, there may be others that go even from the message or the projected brand.

The important thing is to learn from each new advertising campaign or, more generally, from spending, until we understand what works and gives us long-term results.

When there is clarity about what is needed to achieve the objectives, we talk about investment and when it is measurable. That is why it is feasible to say that an increase in advertising spending brings an increase in the company's results and this is known as the return on investment or ROI, which means: How many pesos do I earn for each peso invested in advertising?