Going with your gut has its place in business, and as an entrepreneur that practice has probably worked for you many times. However, when it comes to marketing strategy planning, taking the time to do actual analysis is the best way to figure out what has been working, and what has not, in your marketing efforts. You may uncover some surprises, or affirm your anecdotal assumptions. Either way, you will have a clear basis to begin crafting an effective marketing strategy for 2017.
The first place to start is to collect information on your leads and customers over the past year – if not multiple years. Hopefully you already have a leads-tracking system in place, which could be as simple as a spreadsheet monitoring the date, lead source, product or service desired, conversion status, customer segment and revenue generated. From this information you will be able to analyze the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy. If you do not have a lead-tracking system in place, you now have your marching orders for November!
Marketing efforts should be analyzed based on their intended results. For example, if you are placing an ad in your local church bulletin for community service and branding, it will be difficult to monitor leads from that marketing channel. The goal of branding efforts is to stay top-of-mind for when your customer is ready to purchase. However, if you are advertising a special offer with a strong call-to-action across many channels, measuring success will be much more straight forward. Both the immediacy and breadth of this type of marketing effort provides good information to determine effectiveness. However, you will only be able to uncover this information if every initial phone call and email to your office, or form on your website, involves asking a lead where they heard about you.
Leads are not sources of revenue; customers are. Therefore, it is important to continue monitoring those initial contacts throughout your sales process to understand which marketing efforts are bringing in actual customers. For example, if you receive a lot of inquiries from a pay-per-click campaign but few of those leads convert into paying customers, that marketing channel is not working well. You may need to tweak the ad messaging, the target audience, or the landing page to improve the quality of the leads. You may decide to invest those marketing dollars into a channel that is already resulting in high conversion rates. Or, you may take a look at your sales process to see where leads are falling off and search for ways to improve.
Even though your instincts may have served you well in your business, hard numbers are imperative to creating an effective marketing strategy. At Fresh Figs Marketing, we are not big believers in chucking things out into the world and seeing what sticks. Defining clear goals, using measurement tools, and tweaking our strategy as needed help ensure our clients are investing their marketing dollars wisely. Are you starting your 2017 marketing strategy planning? We’d love to help. Reach out to us via our website or give us a call at 317-910-6252.
