Many companies struggle with consistency over time with their PR. Finally, personal selling is a critical component of any integration marketing strategy. The advantages of personal selling are that companies have a chance to create personal relationships with customers and understand their unmet needs, greater trust is created through more effective communication, and the key messages of a company are more clearly communicated. The cons or negatives of personal selling include its costs, as it is very expensive to have a direct sales force in the field. Second, sales forces tend to turn over rapidly or churn which becomes problematic as new sales people need to be trained. Finally direct sales can easily turn into business development or lose focus on selling when a sales team is not held accountable for its quota. Select and explain the most suitable method for measuring advertising or promotional effectiveness. Your decision must include research to back up the selected method. Be sure to explain why this is the most effective method to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

The majority of companies today rely on both in-print and online advertising, and as a result effectiveness measures must span these two mediums to be effective (Wakolbinger, Denk, Oberecker, 2009). The uses of online and print effectiveness methodologies successfully capture the entire sales funnel of an organization, quantifying the total contributions of marketing, promotion and selling strategies. There are many potential approaches to managing advertising and promotional effectiveness, yet the most effective seek to capture...

The use of awareness, aided and unaided recall across print and online strategies can be more correlated to lower-funnel activities of trial, purchase and potential product or service loyalty when measured in total (Hester, 2009). There is also the need for managing the use of audience-specific metrics to determine how social networks also contribute to advertising effectiveness across all channels as well
(Mangold, Faulds, 2009). The use of sampling-based methodologies by media strategy can also define the relative level of Return on Investment (ROI) and also define which combination of messaging and content-based strategies including offers make a difference in total strategy performance (Wakolbinger, Denk, Oberecker, 2009). By having a stratified research methodology across online and offline mediums a complete view of advertising effectiveness be accomplished.

References

Hester, J. (2009) The Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 86(4), 952-953.

Kitchen, P., Kim, I., & Schultz, D. (2008). Integrated Marketing Communications: Practice Leads Theory. Journal of Advertising Research, 48(4), 531.

Mangold, W., & Faulds, D.. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, 52(4), 357.

Wakolbinger, L., Denk, M., & Oberecker, K.. (2009). The Effectiveness of Combining Online and Print Advertisements: Is the Whole Better…