Are your efforts paying off? Is your marketing achieving results?

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How do you know? Obviously, the first sign is that you are generating numbers: sales, impressions.

But how do you know what people think about you, your product, your service and your marketing efforts? This is a harder question to answer. If people don't attend your event, it could be for a myriad of reasons (don't have time, costs too much not interested). Same thing with your product or service. How do you know why people aren't buying?

It comes down to requesting feedback, and to listening to what your audience has to say.

First, you should ALWAYS request feedback from attendees to your event and people who buy your product. Make it easy for people to provide comments on your website. Have an email address specifically for feedback.

Second, listen to what exactly  is being said about you in the comments  you receive. Also,  cast a wider net: check out <a title="Social Mention" href="http://www.socialmention.com/" target="_blank">SocialMention</a> (or other social media monitoring tools) to see what is being said about you or your brand.

Last week, I tweeted to a local marketing networking group that they were sending me too many email messages. In fact, it got to a point that I would just delete rather than read. The organizational response to me via Twitter  was to tell me they would be happy to remove me from the list. I told them to take my comment seriously. I was giving them FEEDBACK. They didn't want to listen.

You will not know if you are hitting the mark with your marketing efforts if you don't make an effort to gather feedback. You may get some people to buy your product or attend your event, but you may be missing a host of others.

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