The great benefit of measuring marketing is that you can adjust where you buy ads and audience targeting to get a lot more sales from your marketing dollars. This is called media optimization. Here’s our internal scorecard for auditing how well a client is optimizing their D2C media marketing spend:

Media Optimization Scorecard

(X%) Efficient media expands ROI and sales volume.
–  Optimize my media based on front-end response rates, like clicks and CTR.
–  Monitor and manage for clearly winning, or losing, media channels.
–  Have a regular schedule to cut losses and optimize media in all channels.
–  Test regularly – ad copy, keywords, landing pages, cart process.
–  Dedicated testing budget to garner learning.
–  A significant amount of my budget (>15%) is spent in channels that do now produce a trackable return.
–  Track and optimize to one single KPI.
–  Consider multi-channel attribution when optimizing, tracking, and reporting on various media channels.

In direct-to-consumer, you want to test e v e r y t h i n g about the marketing.  Not only can you get big gains from choosing and buying the right media sources, tweaking your creative and offer can yield big returns in more sales and health-conscious customers for your marketing dollar.

Testing creative is about establishing a “control”, or a creative that has consistently out-performed everything else you’ve tried. Once you establish a control ad and you know how well it converts, the game then becomes beating the control. You want to see how you can restructure the ad, change the color, add different buzz words, even experiment with button placements. But, to do this, it will require continuous testing and re-testing of at least 10% of your marketing spend.

One quick hack for creative and offer testing is to test everything in Google Adwords first. Adwords are very stable because people are searching for something. So, if you put up a new $10 off offer, any change in sales is likely to be reliable.

Creative and Offer Testing

(X%) Better creativity resonates and drives more sales.
– Test front-end creative like ad copy and extensions.
– Offers and specific calls to action to improve conversion.
– I test in all channels.
– Have a testing calendar that tracks scheduled, calculated test runs on an on-going basis.
– Beat one or more of my test controls within the past 6 months.
– Over time, we learn which promotions drive more sales.

Where many health brands fall short is that they don’t test, re-test, or optimize their marketing campaigns. When you take the time to dive deep to examine open rates, click-through rates, and sales conversions per campaign, you can begin to create a very clear picture of what works and what doesn’t. Without this understanding and the quantifiable proof to back up your marketing strategy, you could be throwing money away. Be sure to not get trapped in the “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” marketing mentality because the truth is… you won’t know if it is broken (or not) if you don’t test.

For example, if you’re happy with the $64,000 you generate from a Facebook ad, how do you know you can’t optimize it and generate $128,000 from the same ad with a few minor tweaks? The scorecard point is, testing is a health brand’s secret weapon to consistently getting high ROIs. Invest the time and resources now to test your marketing campaigns and you will be handsomely rewarded.