As an entrepreneur, you do know that marketing is paramount to your business. It literally pulls your business along and makes you money. It only makes sense then that you put in a lot of effort into marketing. No wonder that after all the effort, you’d see no results. Here are some ways to squeeze the most out of your marketing dollar:
Try everything, use what works
There’s traditional offline advertising and there’s online advertising. Each of these primary methods of marketing has a gazillion ways of marketing within each. So which marketing methods should you be using? You have no way to know until you test to see what works for your business.
Online marketing has a way to allow you to precisely know how your campaigns are working. You can do the same with offline marketing by using key codes, special tracking methods such as attributing special callback numbers on your promotional items like bags, USB sticks, etc.
Establish Marketing metrics
If you don’t know where you are going, you could go anywhere and that could be down south. It’s important to establish metrics for everything you do in business. Metrics are a fancy way of saying that you should be able to measure whatever you can. Measurements are a good way to track progress.
For example, if you sent out an email with a call-for-action such as to buy your product for 30% off this month, how many people was the email sent to? How many people clicked it open? How many prospects actually purchased? You get the point, don’t you?
Track everything
It only makes sense to track whatever it is that you want to measure. Let’s say you sent out promotional bags with a special phone number printed on them. Or maybe you distributed coupons. How many people responded this month? Once you get these numbers, you can check for responses each month and that’s tracking. Once you get the hang of it, for every month, you know what to do next.
Follow-up like your life depends on it
What’s the point in working hard-to-set-up campaigns and not follow up? Historically, research has proven that most prospects don’t make decisions immediately and are likely to make decisions only after effective follow-ups. That’s why you should call back to find out if your prospects received your promotional stationery (1st follow-up), for instance. Call up a week later to gently guide the prospects to your next step (2nd-follow up). Follow-up is a part of the process. Not doing it isn’t completing the sales cycle.
