What are you measuring?

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | September 28th, 2009

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…

4 reasons your business isn’t taking off

Posted by Jeremy L. Knauff | June 30th, 2009

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

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How much are you wasting on marketing?

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | June 25th, 2009

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

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Why right now is the perfect time to increase your advertising

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | January 30th, 2009

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…

You can’t get there from here

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | January 21st, 2009

Many of our potential clients come to us because their current image isn’t working for them, whether we’re talking about a logo, website or printed marketing materials. They know that they need a new, fresh look to stand out from their competition and make an impact with their prospects. The problem is, that when push comes to shove, some of them want to stick with the same tired old look, using excuses like “this is how everyone else in our industry looks and we don’t want to be too different.” Unfortunately, when a redesign is just a new version of the same old thing not only is it not going to produce the results you want, it will also cause you to lose any branding you’ve currently achieved.

You can’t get get new results by doing the same thing, so…