Promoting your brand, product, or service can be tricky, especially in the age of social media where so much is spread via online-word-of-mouth. Sometimes companies think that by casting a wide net, throwing everything they’ve got out in the digital world, they’ll simply haul in more customers. However, this approach often just brings in a lot of little middling fish, or worse flotsam, that just crowd out the right customers.  Companies also forget that social media is not “free.” The time it takes to run an online campaign diverts resources (time, talent, technology) from other activities. This means it needs to pull its own weight.

The key to good marketing is to know your marketing goals, i.e., know what you want to get out of all this work. As Aaron Coles of Design*Sponge writes on his new advertising blog Building A Better Advertiser “Begin by asking yourself a few questions about WHY you want to advertise in the first place.”

Coles says to ask yourself if you are advertising to improve your sales? To increase brand awareness? To sell one particular product or event? What is your timeline for the campaign, and what are the short-term and long-term goals?

One way to test your online marketing effectiveness is with what Olivier Blanchard calls the F.R.Y. test. An online campaign is worth the time and effort if it can do at least one, and hopefully all, of the following things:

• Increase how often your customers buy from you. (Frequency)
• Increase your total number of customers. (Reach)
• Increase how much each customer spends with you. (Yield)

“Frequency, reach and yield — if your social-media campaign doesn’t pass the FRY test, it’s not generating ROI, Blanchard argues.” (Read more in the post on SmartBlogs).

Sometimes a little push is all you need, as Plexipixel saw just recently with the release of the website we built for Age of Empires Online. Other times a more robust solution is needed, like when we redesigned the Microsoft Silverlight pre-adoption marketing site. The reason these worked is because we figured out what the goals of the project were and stuck to them.

So before you head out on your next campaign, figure out what your goals are and the best course to take to get there.