Episode Introduction
Hi, I’m Tracy Heatley and welcome to my Be Better With Tracy Heatley podcast. This episode is all about why and how to monitor your marketing activities.
As always, I’ll be chatting to you about several aspects that will help give you clarity on this topic. I’ll also be sharing some actionable tips that you can implement in your own time that will really help with your future marketing success.
The idea for this podcast has come from a conversation that I was having with my personal trainer, Scott Wylie. We got chatting about his business and all the different aspects of marketing that he’s got going on right now for targeting new online clients. Whilst Scott and I were talking, it occurred to me that I’m often telling you to monitor and evaluate your marketing, but I’ve never explained why it’s important or how you can do it.
Why It’s Important To Monitor Marketing
So, let’s focus on why it’s important to start off with.
Like most small business owners, you probably don’t have a limitless marketing budget. This means, that you cannot afford to waste your valuable time and precious money on ineffective marketing.
You may also be under the impression that certain campaigns have been really effective, and you know this because shortly after the campaign was launched or your published a certain social media post, you got an enquiry.
The truth is that you could be way of the mark. The reality is that many forms of marketing communications can take longer than you think to come to fruition.
Direct Response Or Brand Marketing
In an earlier episode, I talked about the differences between direct response and brand marketing, which links in nicely with what I’m about to reveal to you.
The fact is that some of your marketing activities, like direct response marketing, may get far quicker results than your brand awareness campaigns. This is another reason why monitoring and evaluating is crucial.
Obviously, different businesses have different lead times and sales cycles, but let me give you some examples of what I mean.
Expos
If you exhibit at an expo, it can take anything up to 11 months for leads to materialise. That’s not to say that it will take so long because you could win new businesses instantly. However, you need to be aware that sometimes these things can take time.
Business Networking
If you’re business networking, you may be lucky and get a referral straight. Usually, though, it can take a bit of time to build relationships and trust before referrals flourish.
Email Marketing
Email marketing needs repetition to gain trust and familiarity.
Social Media
You may be constantly publishing new content on social media, which is great, but how do you know which content works and which doesn’t? The truth is that if you don’t monitor and evaluate, then you won’t know.
Monitor Marketing To Save And Make More Money
Overall, your content may be generating results, but you could be wasting lots of time and financial resources on ineffective content too. Monitoring and evaluating your marketing may not only save you time and money but it could make you even more money too.
That’s just a couple of reasons why it’s crucial to monitor and evaluate. Now let’s pay attention to how you could do this.
Step One:
Ideally, having some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a great for tracking the progress of your sales funnel and lead generation. If you have a CRM, and you haven’t already done so, add a way of tracking where enquiries have come from. If you don’t have the budget for an all singing all dancing CRM, you can track it using spreadsheets if for now. It’s the tracking part that’s important here.
Step Two:
Make your call to action clear and try adding time restrictions on some promotions, content or campaigns. Things like, Offer valid for. Direct Message and ‘Tell me now’ or something similar. Offer closes in two days. That kind of thing. You get the gist.
Step Three:
start referencing all promotions and content. I’m going to give you an example, but you can come up with your own referencing system to suit you. Of the top of my head, let me think of one for my business. Okay, I’ll go with visit my website www.tracyheatley.com, sign up for my newsletter and send me a message quoting BBPOD1 and I’ll give you a FREE one hour marketing mentoring session, worth £250.
Step four:
Log the reference you use and never use it again for anything else, unless it’s exactly the same promotion on exactly the same content.
You could even take it one step further a reference the month, so it could be BBPOD107 for example.
It’s important that you add some kind of incentive for your prospects to the reference, like a promotion or free gift, for examples.
How Mistakes Can Happen
This could be so much more effective that you realise, and I know this from first-hand experience. Many years ago, I used to use direct mail campaigns to target new business owners to offer them a free consultation. This was back in the day when there was no such thing as social media, and I didn’t understand the true value of my worth. Free consultations are a thing of the past! Anyway, my team sent the letters our on the Tuesday and on the Thursday morning, upon receipt of the letter, or so I thought, a I received a call from a new training company that wanted to arrange a consultation.
This is a perfect example of why it’s important to monitor your marketing activities. All the way through the call, I thought it had been the most recent direct mail campaign that had generated the enquiry, right up until, I asked them to quote the reference on the letter. I was dumfounded when I realised that reference number was from a campaign from 2.5 years earlier.
Can you see how we can get things wrong? Also, how important it is to monitor exactly where your enquiries are coming from?
In Summary
In summary, you need to plan, promote, monitor, evaluate and review. Knowing how to monitor your marketing activities is vital to avoiding ineffective marketing.
Consistency is key with this! It’s important that you do this with all your marketing activities. Otherwise, you will never know what’s working and what’s not!
If you would like to be entered into my prize draw to win a free 60 minute online marketing mentoring session with me, leave me a podcast or Google review and I’ll enter you into the draw.
If you need help with finding out more about how to monitor your marketing activities, do get in touch because I’ll be able to help you.
My name is Tracy Heatley and I thank you for listening to my Be Better With Tracy Heatley podcast.
Better Business, Better You!