How do you know if all of your marketing is or isn’t working? In fact there’s a very famous saying by the guy that ran GE Electric, his name is Jack Welsh, and it was, “I know half of my marketing doesn’t work and I know half of my marketing does work… Now I just don’t know which half is which?”. It’s kinda scary when you think about it and this is what happens in businesses. There’s a lot of businesses out there that doing a stack of marketing and they don’t know whether or not if they are getting a return on their investment.
2 ways to make sure that you’re getting in return on your investment is to test and measure; test and measure everything!
To give you some examples of what that actually means; Imagine you ran a marketing campaign for a thousand dollars. For that thousand dollars, you get ten incoming enquiries. Well straight away you know that it’s costing you 100 dollars per enquiry. So we go Okay, ‘how can I reduce my acquisition cost per enquiry?’ Maybe make a better offer, a stronger call to action, a better headline that gets their attention. But we can start to test and measure how many enquiries do I get for my thousand dollars?
Then the next thing to think about is, ‘Okay from an enquiry how many of those do I turn into a customer? That’s called my conversion rate.So lets say I got the 10 enquires and I am only turning 1 into a customer, well my acquisition per customers is going to be a thousand dollars. So then I go, ‘well how can I improve that?’ Maybe it’s a written guarantee or offers, sales script or sales training. If I can convert two customers out of that thousand dollars, now I have halved my acquisition per cost. So, from a thousand dollars it would come down to 500 dollars. So it can be quite a dramatic difference if you just work a little bit harder and understand what is and what isn’t working.
I suggest you do this with all of your marketing because you’ll never know what you’ve got currently running that’s not working. Test and measure everything. Get your marketing campaign an analyse it. How much am I spending? How many leads am I getting in from that marketing campaign? What’s my number of conversions or how many clients am I getting from those leads and what’s my average dollar sale from each sale. Then look at the GP, the gross probability of those sales, and say ‘is it worthwhile continuing this campaign?’
Now, it doesn’t mean that the medium that you are using is not working… Maybe your ads sucks, maybe your message sucks, your offer sucks, don’t give up on it if it’s working a little bit. Maybe you can fine tune it so that it works that little bit better. But it’s no good changing things until you’re actually tested and measuring and getting the numbers. Once you’re getting the numbers, you can start to look at it and go ‘That is working, that isn’t working’, and start making those decisions.
Well, hopefully you are not running any ads or any campaigns that aren’t working but this will help you decide whether or not to keep running them or to stop it completely. Certainly, whatever that is, STOP running ads that won’t work!
About the Author
Ben Fewtrell is a sought-after Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and trainer who has featured in Virgin’s Inflight Magazine and Entertainment Portal, SKY Business and “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”. He is also the host of the popular Business Brain Food Podcast where he interviews leading experts on anything and everything business.
