Are your marketing strategies getting results?

Do you know which marketing strategies are getting you results, and which ones are draining your time and money without bringing a return on your investment?  Every dollar you spend on marketing should have a job description and you should be able to tell the results that it is producing.

Your marketing budget is probably limited, and your time is irreplaceable.

If you’re repeatedly spending them one the marketing  strategies of the week, rather than having a clear and coherent plan for promoting your business and tracking results, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of income, and wasting a lot of resources.

If you’re tired of wondering what’s working and what’s not, and you want to be confident in your decisions about where to invest your marketing budget, here are things things you can do to make that happen:

Know what your goals are

• How many sales do you want to make each month?
• How much monthly income do you want, in specific dollar amounts?
• What other effects do you want your business to have, such as creating jobs, starting conversations, getting newsletter subscribers, or getting affiliates and referral partners?
• Knowing what you want helps you know what you need to get there, and which metrics you’ll need to track so you know what’s getting results.

Know what process you’re bringing your potential customers through

What steps do your leads need to take in order to go from knowing nothing about you, to becoming paying clients?

Here’s an example of a process they might go though:

• They find one of your blog posts while searching for a topic you’ve written about.
• They fill out a newsletter opt-in form on your blog page to get more information.
• They open your email.
• They click a link in your email, which takes them to a sales page.
• They purchase a product.

Your process might not look exactly like that; they might stay on your newsletter for a year or more before making a purchase, or maybe your blog post will link directly to your sales page. But for the purpose of illustration, let’s use this process as an example.

Track each step of your marketing strategies

Once you have an idea of the process your clients will go though, you know which steps you need to keep an eye on.

How many people are reading your blog?

If the answer is “not many”, it’s time to improve your blog content, promote it more heavily through your social media channels, encourage your contacts to share it with their communities, or find some other way to attract more readers.

Google Analytics is one tool you can use to track activity on your site, especially if your site builder doesn’t include a native tracking system.

How many people are opting in to your newsletter?

Compare your number of blog readers to your number of opt-ins each month. If the percentage of opt-ins is very low, try placing the opt-in form more prominently on your page, or testing a different box design or opt-in gift.

How many of your newsletters are getting opened? How many links are getting clicked?

You may need to adjust your subject lines, newsletter content, link placement or email template if you aren’t getting good results.

Once people click the link to your sales page, how many of them make a purchase?

If this number is lower than you’d like, it’s time to improve your sales page.

You can apply this method to any of the marketing strategies you use. What you basically need to know is:

• How many people are viewing your content.
• Where they’re coming from, or how they found you.
• How many people are acting on your content, and how.
• Which points in your sales process are getting a good response, and which ones have a high drop-off rate.

You can use Google Analytics to see how the parts of your funnel that are hosted on your site are working, and your CRM system should include reports on purchases, abandoned carts, click through’s, open rates, and so forth.

When you know these things, you’ll be better equipped to detect weak links in your chain, and either improve or eliminate them.

Know your target numbers

• How many sales do you want to make each month?
• How many click through’s do you need to make that many sales?
• How many email opens do you need to get that many clicks?
• How many opt-ins do you need to get that many readers opening your emails?
• How many site visits do you need to get that many opt-ins?

Notice the ratios in your business – if one out of every hundred click through’s results in a sale, then you know that you need approximately one thousand clicks to get ten sales.

This will help you to get an idea of how many people you need to attract, and where a ratio is bad enough that the content in that part of your marketing system needs to be improved.

Want to attract and convert more leads into paying customers?

If you want to bring more leads and customers to your business, to make a difference in your community, and to create a large, sustainable income that supports the lifestyle you’ve been dreaming of, we want to help.

We have a new weekly blog series being published each Sunday that will describe how to make improvements in your small business marketing programs.  These improvements can be done by you or we can help you by doing some of the work for you.  Simply use the blue pop up to subscribe.