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.
