So, we’ve mentioned the importance of monitoring your marketing and we’re going to continue to do so because of its great importance. Otherwise, if you’re not monitoring your marketing, then it’s similar to throwing a piece of bait into the ocean without securing a line to it. Where did it go? What happened to it? You’ll be asking the same questions about your budgeting if you don’t keep a careful eye on promoting your business.
What’s one of the best ways to keep track of what’s working and what’s not with your marketing? Just ask. It really can be that simple. You should always have several marketing lines in the water, so if you get a new prospect or client, they could have come from any number of sources. One of the first things you should be asking them is “How did you hear about us?” or “Where did you find us?” You should also be sure to ask people via your website as well.
This method may not be earth-shatteringly new, but we just don’t see it that much on the Web or hear people asking us as much. Plus, you know the old adage, when we assume, it makes an ass out of u and me. Even if you’ve heard it before, its significance still bares repeating. By asking people how they found out about you, you then get a direct laser beam on your marketing. If after a couple of months of marketing, you find that 10 people found you through the local newspaper ad you posted, 50 people found you through the Internet and one person found you through your postcard mailers, what does that tell you? Dump the mailers and reallocate that funding towards your Internet and newspaper ads; with a majority of it going towards the more successful method.
We specifically suggested waiting a month or two before assessing your marketing because you should always be looking at statistical significance. Granted, statistical significance does sound pretty cool in a complex way, but it’s pretty simple. If you make an assessment after a week, then that hasn’t allowed enough people to see your add to make an accurate judgment. For example, at that point, you could have had one person across the board, which would have suggested that you keep investing your money equally in each marketing category. But as we saw after a few months, that would have meant a big waste in postcard mailers. So be careful about taking one set of numbers as gospel.
Speaking of statistics, you might gain a lot from a basic statistics class. Don’t worry, there’s no real brain teasers involved and you don’t have to be a true mathematician. What it will do is help you get a general grasp on the behavior and trends of numbers in your business and industry. From knowing what’s statistically significant enough to base your bootstrapped budget on, to knowing that correlation most certainly doesn’t always mean causation, a little extra education here and there will always help boost your business.
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