There's a lot to be said about test marketing. Believe it or not, every ad we run for a client is a test market ad. We're always looking for better returns which means we're always measuring ad performance. You want to know the answer to several questions and if you can accomplish the objective of getting all the answers in one pass, that's even better. First and foremost, you have to control who gets the ad and you have to control that the ad actually gets seen when it gets to the target household.

"What you measure" is the return of the ad. "How you measure" is critical if you intend to get an accurate reading. The most critical part of measure ad performance is actually getting the ad seen when it gets to its destination. The most successful product for this is the 5.5" x 8.5" postcard. The one thing about the postcard is when it comes out of the mailbox, a decision has to be made to keep it or throw it away. Basically, you have 1.3 seconds to get you message across and after that you're a dinosaur. So, make the message clear and easy to understand. Hence the success of the 2 most successful words in the advertising business . . . FREE and SAVE.

For sales measuring purposes, there are basically 2 types of consumer buying markets. The first business type is a business where the customer has to come to you to make a purchase. The second is where you go to the customer to make a sale. For the sake of argument, lets use the first type of business as our example.

If the customer has to come to you in order to make a purchase, the seller is, to some degree, limited in the marketing range. At some point the marketer becomes geographically unfavorable.

There are 3 types of marketing audiences when it comes to promotional marketing activity:

1. The Primary Target Audience Households.

2. The Secondary Target Audience Households.

3. The Minority Target Audience Households.

As you can see, it's pretty self exclamatory.

The Primary Target Audience Households are where the demand for your product or service is going to be the greatest. This is where you should spend the majority percentage (50-65%) of your marketing budget. These are households within a 1 and 1/2 mile to 2 mile radius of the physical location of your business. Depending on the business, some primary audiences could be wider and some could be narrower.

The Secondary Target Audience is going to be a radius of 1 and a 1/2 to 4 miles out from your physical location. This is a part of you business that consists of a lot of households, but a much smaller concentration of customers than your Primary Target Audience. You will probably derive 30 to 35% of your business from this audience, but it will be difficult to get marketing performance from simply because the customer may have to drive past 2 or 3 competitors just to get to you.

Last, there's that Minority Target Audience. These are households that are usually more than 4 miles away from the physical location of your business. These are households that usually account for less than 10% of total sales and profits. So, spend your promotional dollars accordingly.

No matter what kind of advertising product you buy, you always need to be able to measure how much goes where so you can calculate your "Percentage of Waste" factor. If a large percentage of your ad buy is going to households that are geographically unfavorable or if your ad doesn't actually get seen when it gets to the destination households or if your ad performance is minimal at best, you may want to reconsider your media purchases.