Are You Wasting Your Money?  

The chances are you are wasting a large portion of your marketing dollars.  Any sales and marketing dollar is wasted . . . if you do not have a positive method of tracking results!

Most people say they simply don’t track their advertising.  This is particularly shortsighted in any competitive business environment or weak economy and is one of the most common and obvious deficiencies in the analysis of any failed business.

Here is an illustration.  Let’s say you have three places where you have advertising:  a local newspaper, a billboard, and a radio spot.  We’ll say these campaigns have been in place for one month and your business has increased.  But which ads were responsible for the growth? 

Some people say it is difficult to track the results.  I would suggest any business simply ask a very simple question of any new customer or prospect:  “How did you learn of our business?”

Of course, there is more to the process than simply asking the question.  You must not only tabulate the results, you must use the information.  This data is gold!  But it must be mined and refined to be of any true value.

This an excellent place to begin using systems in you business.  You must test everything!  When you design your ad or marketing material do so with the objective of measuring the results.  You want to track inquiries through to sales–the objective of any marketing process.

Why is this “tracking through” important?  You may find that a particular ad generates many inquiries but few sales.  When this happens the copy of the ad needs to be examined, changes made, and the testing process repeated.  However, you will have no way of knowing the inquiries coming from that ad are not producing sales unless you are testing and tracking your marketing.

In fact you may find that some of your ads produce neither sales nor inquiries.  Only if you are testing and tracking each one will you know that those dollars were wasted.  Otherwise you may continue keeping such an ad campaign in your mix never realizing that waste.

Ask yourself, “Can I afford not to spend each marketing dollar in the best, most profitable way possible?”

To your business success!

Paul Elliott
Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2008, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.