Take a look at your marketing. Does it tell people about your products or does it tell people how your products can solve their problems? Does it ramble endlessly on about features and specifications?

If your answer is yes, it’s time to start over.

In marketing, there is an old saying:

People don’t want a 1/2″ drill bit, they want a 1/2″ hole.

Your marketing should focus on the end result, not the product itself. If you sell life insurance, you’re really selling someone the ability to take care of their family in case they pass away. If you sell pest control services, you’re really selling someone a home that is free of the germs and damage brought by insects.

What do you sell? Now, what are you really selling?

All too often, entrepreneurs find themselves short on time, so they end up throwing a variety of marketing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The problem is that few of them have any system in place to measure which ones are performing and which ones aren’t. Whether you are handling your own marketing, or you’ve hired a marketing firm, everything needs to be tracked so that you can quickly and accurately determine what is working and what isn’t, then adjust your approach for a better return on investment.

Simply put, you can only improve what you can measure. Anything else is just a guess and you’re throwing money away.

The first and most obvious step is to install analytics software on your website. This allows you to easily determine where all of your traffic is coming from, as well as looking for trends that can provide insight for future marketing efforts. When it comes to your print, television or radio advertising, be sure to include your phone number and website address, but you should utilize a different phone number for each ad, allowing you to precisely track which call-ins were driven by that ad, and utilize a specific URL or landing page, allowing you to precisely track the website traffic driven by that ad.

This can be applied to any aspect of your marketing. The bottom line is that if you want to improve your marketing, you need to measure the effort that you are putting into your campaigns and compare it to the results you’re getting out of them.

Business can be a fickle thing. Sometimes, what seems like a great idea fails miserably while some of the worst ideas take off and grow like wildfire. More often than not though, there are pretty obvious reasons when a business doesn’t take off or grow. Unfortunately, from the inside looking out, it can be tough to see those reasons.

This certainly isn’t an end all, be all list of everything that can cause your business to stagnate, but it is an excellent starting point to get you moving forward.

1. Your advertising sucks. It looks just like your competitors’ ads, tries to appeal to everyone and has no call to action. If you want your advertising to work, you need to differentiate your company from your competition, target a specific demographic and tell your prospects exactly what you want them to do.
2. You’re throwing away good leads and wasting time on bad ones. Let’s be honest, not all leads are created equal. Some people are just tire kickers, or worse yet, competitors trying to get information on the inner workings of your company. Others are ready to take action right away. If you’re not utilizing a CRM system like ACT or Goldmine, you can’t keep track of who is who; your prospecting and sales process will be inefficient and cost you valuable revenue.
3. You’re not using what you’ve already built. Chances are you’ve already got a website. If you put a little more work into further developing your site though blogging, SEO and online advertising, you can leverage your previous efforts and reap the rewards more quickly than if you had to start from scratch. The same goes for email or direct mail lists. Use what you have and build upon it.
4. You’re not tapping into your existing clients. You’ve already built a relationship with them, so it would be a huge mistake not to approach them about buying your products or services. Your profit margins will be higher since you don’t have to go through the typical prospecting and sales cycle, and they will generally make a decision more quickly. Keep in mind though, don’t push too hard or you may alienate them.

As promised, here is your starting point. You can easily see a dramatic increase in revenue if you implement these simple suggestions, but there is always room for more. What additional tips or ideas do you have?

Chances are that you’ve taken numerous approaches in marketing your company, but do you know which ones were successful and which ones failed. Of your successful approaches, can you quantify how well they performed?

If you’re not tracking where your clients/customers are coming from then you can’t accurately tell which campaigns are performing and which ones aren’t, so you are almost certainly wasting money. The only question is how long will you continue doing so? Here are some easy ways to track the performance of your marketing:

• Take advantage of web analytics, such as Google analytics to see exactly where your visitors are coming from. You can tell which search or PPC keywords, links from other websites, online ads and email campaigns are driving traffic traffic to your website.
• Use a separate phone number for each print advertising campaign. When you receive a call on one of these numbers, you will know exactly which campaign triggered it.
• Implement discount codes for your shopping cart which can be used in your marketing materials. These discount codes will tell you exactly which campaign drove that visitor to your website to make a purchase.

Business is slowing down in most industries. Job loss is approaching record numbers. Access to credit has all but dried up. Common sense says that now is the time to tighten the purse strings and hunker down to weather the impending storm, but common sense is wrong. So why is right now the perfect time to increase your advertising?

Most of your competitors are cutting back or eliminating their advertising. That means that even if you just maintain your campaigns, you’re relative exposure is going to grow, think about the impact if you increase your advertising. Let’s say that your closest competitor cuts their advertising by just 10%, and you increase yours by the same 10%. Right off the bat, you’ll have achieved a 20% increase in exposure over them. Now, when you factor in your typical conversion ratio, you can determine what that will mean to your company in actual revenue. If you’re really smart, you’ll take a portion of that additional revenue and further increase your advertising, resulting in even more revenue. Keep in mind, this example only takes into account your closest competitor. Since most, if not all of your competitors will be decreasing their advertising, your results could be far more substantial than you imagine.

It’s not just a matter of revenue here, though that’s certainly nice. It’s also a matter of increased market share. Market share that will remain yours when the economy picks back up, as long as you continue to do things right.

Something else to consider is that the media companies are feeling the pain too. Many of them are more likely to work out better pricing to keep advertisers like you on board. If their willing to do that, what do you think they’ll be willing to do when you start asking about increasing your advertising with them? When they start mentioning the word “discount” in order to woo you, avoid the temptation to take it. Instead, suggest increased ad space at the same price. A 5-10% might sound good, but 10-20% more advertising for the same price is a better deal, and it’s a win for both you and the media company.

Companies that succeed are the ones that buck the trend and do what everyone else is avoiding. Companies that remain in mediocrity or fail are the ones that follow the herd. Which one are you going to be?