If your marketing is not trackable - is it worth it?
Just yesterday we were re-tooling and re-vamping the Reachd marketing plan. We don't do a lot with print advertising currently but we are looking to get into that space because the people we are trying to reach are not online as of yet. We want to train them and help them move to the online world.
As we considered different advertising options, we always came back to the same question - How will we know the return on the investment. One of the great benefits to online marketing is every click, every registration and every page view is trackable. You know where people live geographically, what link they clicked on, and how long they were on your website.
Offline marketing is more difficult. You can use a special promo code, or register a different phone number, or hope that the visitor tells you where they came from. In the end you are dependent on the user following a specific path.
What am I trying to say with this blog post? Think long and hard about your marketing plan. Look at where every dollar is spent and determine if you are getting anything out of the spend.
What can you do to better track your marketing spend.
1. Make a list of every marketing piece that you spend money on
2. Write down how much that piece costs you per month or per year
3. Look back through your revenue and attribute each sale to some form of marketing.
4. If you have marketing that is not trackable - make a plan to attach some sort of trackable piece to the marketing (such as a coupon, special offer, unique email address, unique phone #, etc.)
5. If you can track your marketing efforts think long and hard about whether they are worth doing.
In the end I know that a lot of you get your business through referrals. How are you tracking or promoting referral business? For me, the way I refer a business to my friend is through email. I will send my friends a link to a website of a company that I like. In the world we live in referral business is still heavily tied to your online presence.
Okay... I've ranted enough. I will let you get to work making your list. If you have questions or comments, please email me.
Rodney Bartlett
Lead Instrcutor at Reachd