Not measuring your marketing Most people in business have some form of internal measurement tool, number of items sold, produced, dispatched, cost of production, downtime, overtime, etc. We tend to measure most things after we create a customer but not what we are doing to create and keep a customer; some companies measure their sales forces effectiveness with varying degrees of sophistication.

What I’ve found is that the vast majority of companies don’t tie down their marketing costs and monitor what’s working and what isn’t.

Why spend money on anything where you don’t know what benefit or outcome you’ll achieve?

Everything in marketing can be measured, you can, through having good systems and being clever with the design of your outbound marketing, capture the results and find out where you’re winning or losing

You can measure the number of calls, the source of business, type of customer and the closing ratio if you have a sales team.

You can measure one ad against another; one headline against another, one type of envelope against another, one bonus, one guarantee against another, one medium against another etc.

TESTING reduces the risk of expensive mistakes.

Through TESTING, you can find out if the content is right on a test mailing exercise. I have changed Clients sales letters advertisements and increased the effectiveness by 20%-30%.

This is real marketing leverage, the SAME INVESTMENT giving you superior returns. If your marketing budget was the same and your sales increased by 20% what would your bottom line look like?

Running Institutional Ads. If you take the Yellow Pages as an example, most people run what I call business card ads i.e. Name Address, what they do, a logo possibly, and maybe a picture.

Typically their ad is grouped together with their competitors and it simply doesn’t offer anything that’s different from the rest or requests that the reader does anything. Consequently the message gets lost in the crowd and they don’t know if it’s working.

The sole purpose of all advertising and marketing expenditure is to generate sales and make money. Spending money on brand building or promoting an image or your name, that’s a waste of valuable resources, name awareness and brand building can come along as a spinoff of everything else you do.

Think about it, how many brochures that people give or send you, do you keep? Does a fancy logo make you do business with them?

It doesn’t make me buy from anyone how about you?

Clients, customers or patients don’t really care if you have been in business for twenty five years or you’re a member of some guild of craftsmen and they aren’t really impressed by some throw away slogan such as we offer a friendly service or we care. What they really care about is……. WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

Everything you do in marketing should concentrate on satisfying, at a profit, the ME FACTOR.

Making Customers Work Too Hard Not telling your customers what to do making it too hard for them to deal with you. For example I was shown to a restaurant table sat down and waited, it was obvious that the waiters and waitresses were busy, but no one came to ask us for our order.

I eventually got up after 10-15 minutes and asked if anyone would be taking our order?

The barman explained to me that orders were placed at the bar!

There was no sign telling me that’s how orders are taken here and the waitress never told me that’s how they operated, as a result they made it very hard for me to give them business and made me feel irritated. Just an example of how a business can make their customers work too hard.

Build a Massive Marketing Mousetrap Imagine if you’d got mice in the house, you wouldn’t just put one trap down would you? To increase the chance of catching the mice, you’d put traps in different locations, using different cheeses, chocolate, and other enticing tit bits, you might even call in a rodent exterminator, buy a cat etc…….. It’s the same in marketing you have to employ a number of techniques to catch and retain customers.

If you rely on only one or two things to bring in business you could become vulnerable if those methods stop working

Always give more than you promise! Bonus Secret ‘Never Stop What’s Working’ If what you’re doing is working keep doing it, find a way to keep doing it even if you get really busy doing what you do. I guarantee that if what you are doing to bring customers in is working and you STOP IT you will not be busy in the future!

So to avoid the big dipper effect keep marketing and you’ll keep your sales at the top.

I’ve seen many small businesses fall into this trap TIP allocate 25% of your time to sales and marketing, book time in your diary to sell.