When you run a small business, you will obviously have several different advertising avenues running – things like newspaper ads, Internet sites, white pages, classified advertising and so on. When you put money into a advertising promotion, if you don’t determine exactly how many leads it brings you, and how well those leads convert into customers, you may as well be gambling your money at a casino. With no measurements, a cook can’t repeat a recipe every time – and that’s the same for your marketing – without measuring results, you can’t know what to repeat again and again. So when it comes time to renew your Yellow Pages advert, you have no idea whether it made you cash, or was just an expense. And that means you’re not in control of the profitability of your advertising – a total nightmare.
Working with somebody from business coach Cambridge will bring the facts about your advertising to the surface.The key to success is to evaluate your results.
Make metrics for your advertising efforts a priority in your firm and you will quickly establish a competitive advantage in your market, or at least catch up with everybody else! Just imagine a fruit machine that pops out £1 for every 10 pence that goes in – you’d stand there all day and push money into that slot! Understanding which campaigns and tactics produce the most sales gives you the edge against your rivals – an edge that most companies simply don’t understand even though you can do it for free.
But How Do You Do It?
You need to approach measuring your results in a different way for each tactic you employ. Use the ideas below to inspire you in other creative ways to test and measure your marketing efforts.Create an enquiries sheet and ask every customer where they heard of you.Use a unique phone number on your website, a different one for yellow pages and yet another for newspaper adverts. Using coupons in ads is a clever way to assess their effectiveness – just count up the coupons that got handed in at the end of each shift, day, week or month and you’ve got a perfect record of how well your ads works.
You can also employ specific names in your ads – just select a name at random that nobody in your company is called and tell customers to ask for them in your marketing.
On your web site have a drop-down box on your enquiry form to ask the customer where they found you – give them options like Google, Yahoo, a friend, etc, as well as an “other” choice with the opportunity to type in some text. Or you can use analytics to give you comprehensive statistics about visitors.
With a bit of luck this has given you some insight and impetus to get cracking and create your own monitoring program of some kind for your marketing.
And of course, if you need some help to get going, you can always consider business coaching uk.
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