Taking the Mystery out of Marketing

Knowing where to start to improve your marketing can be a bit of
a mystery. Is it your marketing message, the places you
advertise, your web site or what? By measuring the results or
your marketing efforts and collecting feedback, you can uncover
the secrets of what is and isn't working and learn what to
refurbish or replace to generate more leads and increase sales.

Tom called me with a question about how to increase sales from
his web site. Despite having spent three thousand dollars to
build an attractive web, he wasn't generating leads from his
site. Only a small handful of people had contacted him since the
site went live two months ago.

Do you have a web site? Are you disappointed by the number of
leads and sales your site is generating?

I asked Tom what percentage of daily or weekly visitors to his
site contacted him. He didn't know the answer. I asked him how
many people visited his site per month. He didn't know. I asked
him, how many sales of his books and coaching services had been
generated by his web site. He didn't have that information,
either.

If you want to improve the performance of any marketing effort,
whether online or offline, make the effort to collect and
evaluate the results. You can use easily available numbers to
help you fix what's not working and improve what is.

Ever go on a diet? How do you tell if your eating and exercise
regimens are working? You step on the scale and look at the
number of pounds you've lost or gained. This simple figure gives
you the truth about the success of your dieting efforts. To
improve sales, track response to each of your marketing efforts
and conversion rates.

1. Response Rates
If you spend money on advertising to drive people to your
business web site, you want to know how many people responded to
your ad and visited your site. If you're only getting a handful
of responses, the problem could be your ad. Something as simple
as changing the marketing message you use in your advertising or
in your search engine listings could increase your response
rate.

If you've had success with the ad in another publication, it may
be that the particular ezine or web site isn't reaching your
target audience and you'd be better off spending your
advertising dollars elsewhere. If you track your ad results you
can quickly discover where to avoid spending on advertising that
doesn't work and make changes to get more out of each
advertising dollar.

2. Conversion Rates
If your web site draws lots of visitors, you'll want to know
what percentage of those visitors are buying, and if not buying,
at least signing up for your ezine. With these conversion rates
you can determine how to increase your online sales.

Barbara has a subscription-based web site that pulls in over
twelve hundred visitors a day, yet only seven people a day
contact her and the site only generates sales a couple of times
a week. Is this the best she can do? Probably not.

You can prompt 10-50% of the people who visit your web site to
contact you and then work on converting these qualified leads to
sales. For Barbara, all it took was a few changes in her layout
and copy for her to add two to three hundred people a day to her
list of qualified leads and increase sales to dozens each day.

One of the most important things to identify and measure is
where sales come from. If you advertise with Google or in ezines
and see that an ad has more than paid for itself in leads
generated and sales, you'll know its worth running again.

Just asking people where they heard of you or how they arrived
at your web site is useful. When I asked one client how they
found my site, they explained how they had been searching the
web using the phrase, "marketing services" and how difficult it
had been to find the site.

My advertising hadn't targeted the phrase "marketing services",
so I quickly added it to the list of keywords for my ads. The
result? The next day someone came to my site via my targeted ad
and bought every marketing manual I sell.

Don't let marketing be a mystery. Start analyzing what is and
isn't working so you know what to fix. If your marketing is
working, use these same numbers to set new goals for lead
generation and salës conversions and be even more successful.