By John Eberhard
In marketing you are going for a response to your marketing and promotional efforts. You don’t just want to get your name out there, or send out promotion just for the sake of sending it out. You want people to respond to you.
So what information do you track?
- If your company does lead generation, meaning your marketing efforts are geared towards getting leads in (people inquiring about products or services) that are handed over to sales people – then you should be tracking the number of leads in every week.
One comment about this. Tracking leads requires that you make a record of each lead that comes in, with the date and contact info, and also find out the source of the lead – what prompted them to respond to you. Many small companies and some larger ones do a poor job of this, if they do it all. If you do get the source of the lead, you can track the responses to individual promotional items. One problem with this is many people cannot answer what prompted them to contact you. But you still need to try to get the source information.
- If you are selling something directly online in a shopping cart, obviously you want to track the dollar amount of sales.
- If you are offering some free item like an ebook, to build your list and develop people into leads, you track the number of requests for the free item.
Once you are tracking this information effectively, when your leads or sales are down, you know you have to promote more to get them up. When leads or sales are up, you can look for what promotion you did that helped that.
If you are getting source info on all or most of your leads, you can tell which promotional items are working well for you and which ones aren’t. So when lead statistics are down, you can compare the response to your recent ads, emails or promotional items, against ones you were using when the statistics were higher. Often you will find that one of your recent ads has bombed, and you need to get that out of the lineup immediately.
When lead stats are up, you analyze things to see which ad or promo piece is bringing in more leads. Then keep running that one or expand what you are doing with it. You can also take that same message and offer and use it in other media.
By continually tracking the results to your marketing, and analyzing what made the stats go up or down, you can be on the road to controlling your leads and sales.
If you’d like help with tracking your marketing results or analyzing how your marketing is going and how to improve it, contact us at 661-441-2429, or fill out a form here.
