We spend so much money, time and effort on different marketing strategies
but often don’t track their performance. Many businesses, when asked “what
advertising gives you the best ROI?”, will often say they have no idea.
Think about this, you might spend $1000 or even up to $6000 per year on a
single yellow pages advert and not really know how well it has performed, but if
you hired a sales person you would want to make sure they were reaching their
targets. Really there is no difference between the two, they are both business
marketing tools and they both should perform.
Businesses could literally save thousands of dollars on their advertising spend if
they tracked things better.
So why do businesses spend money on advertising and not keep tabs on it? I
think it is a lack of two things; time and know-how.
Time is not something you can change, but we can work smarter to achieve
more and once the correct processes are set up, keeping tabs on your marketing
results does not have to be time consuming, but it does pay your back in
dividends.
As a starting point, all you need is a way to record where your leads are coming
from. For this you will need a good CRM system, e.g. Solve360, Salesforce,
SugarCRM. A CRM will allow your staff to record how a new client heard about
your business. This comes down to you or management making it a policy that all
new clients are asked the simple question, “how did you hear about us?”
The other key thing is to track and test all your advertising. Keeping track of
where your leads come from as we mentioned above, is a very simple way to
do this, but your business website and digital marketing can also do so much,
as well as helping you automate some of your sales process. They are also cost
effective and will track things more effectively than most other mediums.
Post written by
David Ligtenberg
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