Manual and automated methods of measuring advertising effectiveness
When I had my restaurant, I used to do a lot of advertising to try and encourage my customers to come to my venue but I was finding it difficult to track my sales and find what was working and what wasn’t.
It was already a busy place, but the figures that I had in my accounting system, told me that we need more sales to be a more profitable business.
I already had a good team in my staff, great menu, and lots of positive feedback from our regular customers. So I knew what I was doing was good, but I wanted to increase the sales, as I knew that we could be busier and not have to increase our staff numbers.
So I turned to advertising, as through the multiple workshops and business plans, this was how I could get more people to my place.
I implemented many different types of advertising; local newspaper ads with a good write up about the business, and continuing buy 1 get 1 free voucher, to encourage people to come to the business.
Shop a dockets were a good way to bring people in, as they shopped next door at the supermarket, and then would relax over a coffee and cake, so this also performed well for a couple of years.
Now I am a figures person. How many dollars are coming in, how many customers are using these vouchers. I wanted to know the details. I used to do this manually.
- So my girls would record all the sales,
- The data was then entered into a spreadsheet
- I would then analyse and calculate the data on a monthly basis, to see the effectiveness of the campaigns.
- If the advertising campaigns were going well, and we had good returns, then it would continue.
- If the campaigns were not performing, then I would ditch it pretty quickly.
When you actually track your sales and know what is going on with the real figures, it is so much easier to make decisions.
I included my staff in these methods, so they were also aware of why they were doing this, and were fully engaged in following my procedures and requests.
Although, they were able to collect the data, my time was still taken up with the tracking and analysis
We continued with this method for a few years and then smartphones and tablets come out. Technology changes, POS systems are now apps, and I am thinking that this would be so much easier if it was automated.
Automating the methods of measuring advertising effectiveness
Looking at a spreadsheet is like looking at blocks of numbers, and it is easy to miss stuff or continually look for the same things.
Yes I could see what was going on to make decisions, but there can be so many factors that affect the spreadsheet – wrong formulas, human error at the register (not collecting the information), wrong calculations at reconciliation, etc.
What I had was good, but not 100% accurate. And this is what I wanted.
So I entered the world of software development and Maralytics was born.
Being a restaurant owner and manager is hard work, and you have so many responsibilities and duties to operate a venue. I wanted Maralytics to remove the errors, guesswork and be automated, just like a POS system does as well.
Maralytics collects the information from your POS at the customer contact point. It does everything a spreadsheet provides, but in a format that is easy to view and compare, accurately with no errors.
