Marketing should never be impulsive, it should be planned and strategic. If you make random unplanned marketing decisions you waste money. Worst of all you won’t be able to track whether your marketing effort is a good investment or a bad one. The reason why people say marketing doesn’t work, is that they do marketing activities they can’t measure. Small business owners need to know that if they’re not measuring their campaigns, they will fail.
Every time you spend money to promote your business make sure you have a way to measure the effectiveness of that campaign. What are you trying to accomplish with the advert? What action do you want the person seeing or hearing your advert to take? You want them to call you? If so make sure the phone number is prominent on your advert. Want them to visit your website? Make sure the link is embedded if it’s an online advert or for print advert keep the copy to a minimum. This way the web address is prominent. Do you want them to visit your shop? Then make sure the directions and or address to your shop is there and visible.
Once you’ve decided on your marketing or advertising goal, the next thing is to make sure that you can track it. Does your advert have a promo code that you’re asking customers to use? When you get calls or store visits are you asking those customers where or how they heard about your business?
If you’re running an advert with a call to action for a month make sure that within that month everyone answering your company or business phones must know to ask the callers or store visitors how they heard about you. This information will help you gauge and measure what adverts work, and which do not and which ones actually translate to actual sales. You should do this whether you’re running just one advert on one medium or on several.
Measuring your marketing campaigns
You should make sure you’re measuring not just how many sales you make, but also the value of each sale. If you spend $1000 on an advert and get 50 customers more than you would get in the same period then good. However calculating whether the marketing investment was a success requires you to go even further. What was the total value of those purchases? Was it more or less than $1000? If it was $1500 then you made $500 from the advert and this was a good investment. Did you retain any of those customers? If so then the actual value of the customer will increase over time and that campaign was a success.
If you’re still not sure how to measure or plan your small business marketing campaign we can help.