​In any good manufacturing or software business, there will be rigorous quality assurance processes to make sure every product is up to standard. The quickest way to lose a customer is to fail to deliver on your promises. But if you measured every single thing, you'd never get your product out of the door. You couldn't test every keyboard that comes off the manufacturing line.

Instead you need to take meaningful measurements at regular intervals. You need to decide:

• When during the manufacturing process should you take samples to test?
• How often will you pull a sample from the line and test it?
• How will you effectively and efficiently test the sample to get useful results that will inform production and highlight any issues?
  

I believe this is why marketing often gets a bad reputation: marketers fail to measure their activities and demonstrate the results.

Just like you would check the quality of a product's components and subassemblies as well as the product as a whole, so too should you measure different elements of your marketing.

But marketing measurement doesn't have to be complex, especially if you know your way around an Excel spreadsheet.
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Here's how to do it.

In engineering, you'd probably prototype and test a product before investing in expensive tooling.

Likewise, in marketing you want to avoid wasting large sums of money on activities that don't pay off. When trying any new marketing activity, it's always best to start small and scale up.

Within the Watertight Marketing network, we talk about starting at "functional and not embarrassing". This is your prototype. If you need a piece of marketing to fill a gap, then start with something functional and not embarrassing and build on it later.

Your prototype marketing activity should be used to test three different things.

Marketing often gets a bad name because marketers fail to demonstrate ROI. There are two parts to this issue: one is in the planning and the other is in the post-campaign measurement (which I'll cover in a future blog).
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In this blog I'd like to share how I work out whether a campaign is going to deliver ROI. If I can't demonstrate that it has a high chance of success - before we start planning the actual activity - then it's scrapped. Even if it sounded like an amazing idea when it was first floated.

This process applies for almost all marketing activities and campaigns, whether it is advertising, email, direct mail, an exhibition or event, PR, or social media. Here's what you do...

Early on in any engineering design process, there's always a period of fact-finding.

• What are other people doing successfully? Let’s make sure we make use of any existing knowledge and build on what others have achieved.
• How will you build this system? What techniques will be most appropriate? What components should you consider including? Which suppliers will you use? What are the costs likely to be?
• Is there any IP we need to be aware? Are there any regulatory restrictions that need to be considered?

​Apply the same process to your marketing.

In previous blogs I've talked about the real purpose of marketing and about how to create a specification for your marketing. The next step to engineering your marketing is to brainstorm ideas and prioritise.

In an engineering design process, this is usually the most creative part. It's fun to brainstorm new features that you could add into your product, system or service. And it's always a useful exercise to do because you might come up with ideas that are quick and easy to implement while adding value to your offering. Even so, there will always be features that would cost more to realise than they'd recover in increased revenue.

If it'll be prohibitively expensive to include every desired feature in your product, you need to prioritise.

Which features are essential because the product won't function without them? Which are highly desirable? And which can be added into future versions or premium editions of the product?

In marketing this is often where business owners find themselves overwhelmed.

Every business owner I've ever worked with can write a list as long as my arm of the marketing activities they could do if time and budget were unlimited. But how do you know which activities will pay off? How do you know in what order to do them all to get the best ROI?

An unprioritised wish-list is overwhelming and stressful. 

In my last blog ("What's the point of marketing?") I discussed how the first step in engineering a new product is to establish its purpose. In marketing it's the same, you need to establish the purpose of your marketing and how it needs to support your customers at every stage of their buying decision.
Once you've done that, you need to define your specification.

An engineering specification or functional design specification will typically include everything you want the product to do, how it should work, how it should be manufactured, timescales, cost restrictions and any other pertinent requirements.

In my last blog, I used the example of designing a keyboard. In this scenario, I'd need my specification to describe...

• The type of computer or tablet it was going to be suitable for
• Whether it'd be wired or wireless
• The keyboard layout
• The colour, size, shape and ergonomics
• Whether it would include any extra functionality such as media buttons or an integrated mousepad

It's always tempting to sidestep this phase or start with a rough outline of what you want to achieve, However, the consequences of this approach can be costly.

Most people who aren't marketers think of marketing as "getting your name out there". That if you want more customers, then you just need to tell more people about your product or service.
 
This assumes two things:
1. That as soon as people hear about you, they'll just "get it" and immediately understand the benefits of your product.
2. That the decision to buy is an easy one that doesn't involve too much thought.
 
If you sell an impulse-buy, like cupcakes, chocolate bars or jewellery, those assumptions are probably correct. So a marketing strategy that focuses on promotion (or "getting your name out there") is probably correct.
 
However, for most businesses I work with, at least one of these assumptions is wrong.