Make More Money with
Marketing Metrics
Jeremy Cohen
(718) 784-1121
Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm EST
Do you know how effective each of your individual marketing
tactics is?
Many small business owners market in a vacuum.
They spend money on brochures, advertisements and web sites
with no real way to tie specific results to specific
endeavors.
If you are unable to associate leads and sales with the
specific marketing efforts that generate them you have no
way of knowing which ones are working as effective marketing
mechanisms and which are not.
The money you invest in marketing your company is precious.
In order for you to maximize your return on your marketing
investment you need to know the results individual marketing
efforts generate. When you know the results of your marketing
tactics you can make more informed decisions about how to better
allocate your marketing budget.
For instance, if you concurrently run a direct mail
campaign, a search engine advertising campaign and weekly
ads in industry periodicals without some method to discern
results you will not know which effort generates the lions
share of any new business.
If you don't know that your direct mail campaign yielded 90%
of your revenue with a 2% response rate, you are powerless
to make the wise decision to reinvest in the direct mail
campaign and make changes to or drop entirely the other
campaigns. What's more, if you can manage to double
the response rate of your direct mail campaign, you can nearly
double the revenue your marketing budget generates without having to
spend money on search engine marketing and periodical
advertisements.
Measuring your marketing results will help you save money by
allowing you to eliminate unproductive marketing tactics and
at the same time, will help you make more money by allowing
you to reinvest in your most productive marketing tactics.
Do you have a method for measuring the effect of your
marketing?
Here are four tips for gathering the information you need to
make wise marketing investment decisions.
Use a Database
Start by designing a database to keep track of individual
marketing efforts and the leads and sales they generate.
Make sure you include fields to track the dates of your
campaigns, campaign descriptions, the number of leads
generated and sales made. Once you have a central storage
location for this information you will be able to make
queries to glean the information you need to make wise
marketing decisions that enhance sales.
Ask Questions
When you or your staff speaks with a prospect on the phone
make sure you ask how they heard of your business; was it a
referral or an ad in the local newspaper? It's such a simple
way to gather valuable information but many small business
owners overlook it.
Be sure to ask your prospects how they heard of your
business.
Make It Easy for Your Prospects to Help You
Make it easy for your prospects to identify the
marketing piece to which they respond. One way to do this
is to assign a special promotional code to each campaign.
Print codes near your phone number on brochures and fliers
in your advertisements, wherever. Just be sure to ask for the code when your prospects call.
Data Entry Should Be Easy Too
Once you or a staff member has garnered the information you
seek from your prospect, make it as easy as possible to have
this information entered into your database system.
If you employ a staff, make certain everyone is up to speed
on your latest systems. Training is a must.
Move Your Marketing Forward™
The idea is to gather as much information as you can about
which marketing mechanisms generate the best (and worst)
response, who is responding and why they chose to respond.
Once you have this information you will be better able to
think like future clients, cater your marketing material to
their needs and generate more leads and sales.
What are some other steps you can take to measure the effect
of your marketing efforts?
