Measure Your Marketing For Bigger Earnings

When you run a small business, you will obviously have several different marketing avenues running – things like newspaper ads, Internet sites, white pages, classified advertising and so on.  When you put money into a marketing campaign, 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 cash at a casino.  With no measurements, a cook can’t repeat a recipe every time – and that’s the same for your advertising – without measuring results, you can’t know what to repeat again and again.  For example, if you run a radio campaign that costs you ,000 at the same time as you do a leaflet drop for ,000 and in total make ,000 return, you need to recognize which has worked the best in order to see where to spend another time.

Working with somebody from Cambridgshire based business coach will bring the facts about your advertising to light.  Measuring results is crucial.

Make measurements for your advertising efforts a priority in your business and you will rapidly establish a lead 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 would stand there all day and push cash into that slot!  As soon as you start to measure your results, you will have a new focus for your marketing and the ability to grow your business at will.

But How Do You Do It?

This varies depending upon the marketing strategy you’re using. The following ideas will be adequate to get you started.Create an enquiries sheet and ask every customer where they heard of you.Tell your sales staff to ask where the new customers heard of you, then to enter that data into your customer relationship management system so you can report on it later.  Using coupons in ads is a clever way to assess their effectiveness – just tally 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 use specific names in your ads – just select a name at random that nobody in your business is called and tell customers to ask for them in your advertising.

On your web site have a drop-down box on your enquiry form to ask the customer how they found you – give them options like Google, Bing, a friend, etc, as well as an “other” choice with the chance to type in some text.  Another great way to track customer sources is to use statistical analysis on your website, often known as analytics, to track what keywords people have used to find you, or what sites they’ve come from.

Hopefully this has given you some inspiration and motivation to get cracking and create your own monitoring program of some kind for your advertising. 

And of course, if you need some help to get going, you can always consider UK business coaching.

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