When times are tough, it is recommended to increase your marketing so that you can increase your market share. In tough economic times, you need to be smart with your money. You need to ensure that your marketing is either building your brand or bringing in customers. But how do you know if your marketing is doing this? How do you know if you are getting your money's worth?
You can't monitor what you don't measure. Therefore, you need to start measuring where you are getting your customers from. How do you do this? Ask them! At each enquiry, ask your customers where they heard about you. Ensure that all your staff know how to do this and why they are asking, so that they understand the importance of doing this.
Now that you have this information, you need to record it somewhere. Monitor your responses on an excel spreadsheet. At the end of each month, you can clearly see where your leads are coming from.
I had a friend who was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to negotiate with a regional television network on advertising. The salesman told him that he was guaranteed to win sales if he advertised on the television. My friend negotiated that he would setup a separate phone number and pay the television company for each call he received through this phone number. Unfortunately for the television company, he didn't get many calls. The lesson here though is that he could easily monitor what success he had from this form of marketing.
Once you begin monitoring the sales leads, you need to know how many of these you convert into actual sales. What is your success rate? You can use the same spreadsheet to monitor these results also. The aim of this is that you can then work on your sales process to increase this conversion rate. You can also work out how many leads that you need to meet your budgeted sales projections.
Once you begin measuring these two simple areas, you can easily see how easy it is to ensure that you are being smart with your marketing budget to maximise its effect.
Jodie Thompson
PJT Accountants & Business Advisors
Phone: 54139300