Test and Measure your marketing activities
I have an underlying belief that drives my goal planning success. I truly believe that anything you measure usually improves.
This focus will naturally help you to improve. However, I often experience the fact that by focusing on the measure of one key area you end up drilling down to work on the smaller ‘success’ activities that deliver the improvement you desire.
For example, your objective may be a specific turnover target per month. This is purely an outcome of activity in your business, so I’d encourage you to breakdown the activity needed to deliver your desired outcome. If you don’t understand the make up of the desired outcome, then what happens when you don’t achieve it? Try harder?
Perhaps to achieve that turnover goal you need to break it down to measure the number of new customers you win each week because you know those aquisitions will deliver your financial goal. However, diving deeper, what is needed to win new customers? With the focus and desire to achieve this number of new customers, you may need to increase the number of conversations you are having, thereby improving the number of leads you generate, having more meetings and therefore winning more customers. Iin summary it is simple – better activity measurement leads to improvement.
From a marketing perspective, the key is to know which activities to focus on and what numbers to aim for.
Firstly, can I recommend that you test and measure your marketing activities to better understand what works, what needs a tweak and what does not work, so should not be repeated.
I speak with many business owners who simply do not know which part of their marketing is working for them. I find it common that all marketing activities are viewed as one and there is no measure of how a new customer specifically finds you.
It is also common for a business to know that the latest new customers came from a specific campaign, but do not know what it was about that campaign. So for example, the last email marketing communication generated 5 new clients. Great, but why? Was it the headline, the content, the background colour, the image used or the offer? Test different versions of what works to learn more about your success and drive further improvement. If you simply do more email marketing without knowing the reason why, then you may miss a trick.
I encourage you to measure your marketing activity to the level that you can specifically identify which part of your marketing worked for each new customer and each new sale.
Once you know this, you can then start to test different variations of that activity and then gradually improve this even further until your marketing becomes even more powerful and profitable. So for example, your last batch of new customers came from your Google Adword campaign, but by testing different alternative messages or calls to action, can you gain even more enquiries.
People say to me that measuring is too difficult and therefore unreliable. Well the easiest way to find out is to ask. You could ask verbally or use email or online tools to ask the question. You need to be asking each new customer how they found you and why they brought from you. However please ensure your questions drill down to find the true reason which may not be the first reason they give you. For example, you may ask and the new customer responds “I found your web site on Google”. However when you ask the deeper question, you identify that they searched for your business name because a friend passed on your name or they saw you somewhere else.
There are many other ways to identify your true lead source. Could you use codes or references within your marketing material that you ask the prospect to quote to receive your offer. You should utilise your online analytics from your web site or social media platforms to identify lead paths. Why not try specific landing pages for any campaigns that drive people to your web presence. These such actions will get you much closer to the results you desire from your activity measurement.
The second part is to know what numbers to aim for. This clarity provides you with the information you need to drive the activity needed to get the desired end result. For example, if you don’t know your conversion rates at the different stages of your sales process, then how do you know what target to set?
As a very simplistic example, you know that for every meeting you have, results in an invitation to quote 75% of the time. From those quotes you have given you convert 50% to sales. So if you want 12 new customers this year, you can confidently set a target to ensure you have 32 meetings. By having 32 meetings you know that your measured conversion rates will give you those 12 new customers.
12 sales is your desired outcome, 32 meetings is a ‘success’ measure. However, what other activities do you need to measure to ensure you undertake the effcitive activity to generate that number of meetings? For example, How many networking meetings do you need to attend? How many referral requests do you need to make? How many referrals do you need to receive? How many phone calls need to be made? How many social media posts or engagements? How many online campaigns?
It’s simple. Once you know what marketing really works for you, then you know what to do more of in the future.
Focus on the right activity and see your lead generation and customer acquisition grow.