There are a lot of things small businesses take into account when it comes to promoting their products.
Where to advertise?
How much to spend?
What kind of demographics should I target?
However, one simple thing many forget to do, is track where their actual customers are coming from and more importantly, where they are not. Why should you care about tracking, you may ask. If you’ve got customers coming in the door, then who cares where they come from? Your wallet should care for starters. It’s about optimization of your marketing and therefore optimization of your business. Let’s look at a simple example.
50% of your budget goes to Advertisement A
50% of your budget goes to Advertisement B
80% of your customers found you because of Advertisement A.
Get the picture?
Obviously, you are wasting a lot of money on B and you should start placing that money into A and therefore maximize your potential customers. Well, if you were tracking you could see this, but more importantly, you might see that customers coming from Advertisement B have a value 5 times that of A. Thus, it would in fact be more beneficial to place your dollars with B. Another important item to understand is tracking those who don’t become your customers. If you have something hanging in your teeth that scares people, don’t you want somebody to tell you its there? The same concept applies in business. You can’t necessarily see from the eyes of the consumer and you might be pushing customers away for any number of reasons that you haven’t thought of. Maybe they don’t like the color of your product, or maybe the packaging is faulty? These are often simple things to fix but if you don’t know about these things then you can’t fix them. It doesn’t hurt to ask.
This, ladies and gentleman, is called optimization of marketing strategy and you can’t optimize anything if you don’t have information to work with so here are three rules to remember when marketing your business:
Rule #1
Ask EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMER where they came from and how they found out about you, not to mention why they do or do not like you. This is huge!!!
Rule #2
Make sure you are actually compiling this data and REVIEWING IT!!! Data is useless without analysis.
Rule #3
ADAPT your strategy accordingly with what you find. Only the strongest survive, and in business this century, that means the quickest to ADAPT!!!
Even more simply, we’re gonna break these down into three easy to remember steps:
COLLECT
ANALYZE
ADAPT
By following these simple rules you can help your business to gain more customers by using the proper promotional techniques and waste less by avoiding those that are not working. Remember though, you can’t do either of these without TRACKING!
Good Luck!
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