As I review many profit plans/budgets with my clients this year, it is evident that most are planning for some growth and many are planning for significant growth. Of course, there are many factors that go into achieving that growth: Effective marketing and sales to bring in additional work, enough of the right people to produce the work, appropriate capitalization, and the strategies, systems and monitoring to ensure that the additional work is profitable.
One of the Four Ways to Grow your Business, simply put, is to get more clients. To do that you usually need to increase or improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts or improve your sales close rate – or both.
Do your advertising and marketing efforts really boost sales? Are you getting the best returns from your marketing budget by targeting your media and your audience? Or are you just taking a shotgun approach and hoping for the best?
If you don’t have a system to measure the results of your advertising, then you’re probably relying heavily on guesswork. And you probably aren’t getting the best bang for your marketing buck. You’ll only know for certain if you measure and track the results of your marketing strategies.
Remember the adage ‘What you can measure you can manage’. If you can measure the results of your marketing, you can assess just where advertising is really boosting your sales – that is, where you earn multiples of each marketing dollar you spend.
You may object that it takes too much time and effort. There is some justification in that view. You run a small business, and you may not have a lot of time or resources to operate complicated measurement or tracking program. But fortunately, there are some simple techniques for assessing your advertising return on investment.
These vary according to whether you measure advertising that has been focused on a particular service and designed to get a sale in the short term, or whether it was designed to work long term, influencing buyer attitudes towards your business and building a certain image.
You can use coupons, postcards or ads that correspond with special offers and then test the response. You can test ad response through hidden offers of the type, ‘Mention this advertisement and get 15 percent off’, or ‘Call this number for more information.’ Or you can use trackable link or phone number in your offer. If you record the number of inquiries, you can get some idea of how successful the ad has been. You can also run two versions of the same offer through a ‘split-test’. Each version would carry a slightly different offer and you could record which one got the most responses. You can also keep records of sales of advertised and related items in the days or weeks after an advertisement.
Measuring attitude marketing takes a little more stamina. You will be tracking many different strategies for marketing and brand awareness including not only print or other media advertising, and direct mail, but your signs, website and internet marketing, networking and any other methods you are using to promote your company.
You will need to track the results of a number of marketing campaigns over a period of months by keeping up-to-date records on a monthly basis to track the number of leads, bids, sales as well as the dollar value of the sales from each of your marketing strategies. I use a Sales Tracking Template built in Excel that I developed, or you may be able to get the information you need from a CRM (assuming you are using it effectively). This will allow you to compare sales year to year and judge the individual and cumulative effect of your marketing campaigns.
Start tracking your marketing success now for this year, and you will be able to fine-tune your plan going forward to use your marketing dollars wisely and increase your return on investment.