One of the best things you can do for your business is to ask
new customers how they found out about you. But when you do
this, don?t expect to get accurate information.
I know this sounds strange, but it makes sense, I promise.
If you make decisions about how to promote your business, then
obviously you want to know how your customers find out about
your business. So, you ask. The trouble is the information you
get when you ask this questions is not always accurate. In fact
it?s mostly inaccurate. My estimate is that it's about 25%
accurate at best.
There are two reasons for this.
One reason is that people simply do not remember. People don?t
remember because they have other, more important, things to
occupy their mental space. Your business and your marketing are
not tops on their list of priorities. (Sorry!)
But, they want to give you an answer (because you asked) so they
say some thing makes sense. ?I saw your ad in the yellow pages?
they might say. Or ?I think I found you in the phone book?. I
know because I do the same thing. It?s not that we?re dishonest.
We just want to be helpful.
A friend of mine told me about a survey they did once for an
event they helped promote. They asked people how they found out
about the event and over half of them said they heard about it
on the radio. On the surface this sounded like great marketing
feedback.
But there was one problem.
They never promoted this event on the radio.
People said ?I heard about it on the radio? because they wanted
to be helpful and because they listened to the radio a lot. So,
it made sense (to them) that they probably heard about the event
on the radio.
The second reason this sort of feedback is usually not accurate
is because people hear about your business in many ways.
Remember, if you?re doing your marketing well you are probably
using more than one media to deliver your message to your
market. Depending on your budget and market you might be using
five or more different ways to let people know who you are and
what you do.
It?s not hard to find five or more ways to promote your local
business:
*On site signage *Yellow pages *Bus bench *Newspaper ad *Direct
mail piece *Coupon shopper *Newspaper insert *Networking *TV
*Radio *Local sponsorships
And this is good because it builds both awareness and
credibility for your local business. (Remember, the more ways a
person hears about your business, the more credible and
memorable your message becomes to them.)
The trouble is, people are not going to remember (or tell you)
they saw it in all these different places. They?ll give you the
name of one place they saw your ad. (Usually the most recent
place they saw it.)
So, we have a marketing paradox.
To get the best results you want your message to be seen by
people in multiple ways. But, that makes it impossible to
determine (with any accuracy) which media is working best. And
you want to know what media works best so you can make the best
use of your marketing dollars.
What do we do about this?
It would be nice if a complete answer to this question would fit
in the next few paragraphs. But it won?t. A complete answer
covers a lot of ground that I have been writing about for the
past six months. And it depends on a lot of factors like your
business, your budget, your marketing goals, etc.
It also depends on how important tracking marketing ROI is to
your business.
One of the big obstacles to tracking results is scale. As a
small, local business, if you went to the expense of trying to
survey and track every type of marketing available to your
business, you?d spend much more on tracking and surveying than
you would on the marketing itself.
If you have a multi-million dollar marketing budget then you can
afford to do some serious testing. Once your testing shows you
reasonable results, then you roll out the big campaigns on a
larger scale. But that only works because your testing costs are
a tiny fraction of your whole marketing plan.
But, for those of us with small, local businesses, this method
simply does not work. The testing would eat up most (or all) of
our marketing budgets.
However there are some things you can do to try to monitor what
is working. Over the next few months I will be writing in more
detail about these. (We don?t have room here in one article to
cover them properly.)
In the meantime, here are some tips to make your local marketing
work better and to help you monitor it.
1. Establish a budget and commit to it. Consider this as
important as your rent or payroll. Don?t make it a low priority
unless your revenue and profitability are low priorities. 2.
Decide what you want to say and whom you want to say it to. Keep
the message simple, clear and concise. 3. Decide if you want to
increase awareness for your brand or if you want a direct
response. These are two DIFFERENT goals and they require
different tools and strategies. 4. Remember your goal is
EXPOSURE. You want to expose your market to your message as
often as you can within your established budget. So spend your
marketing dollars to buy this exposure as effectively as you
can. 5. Stick to it for a reasonable amount of time. Don?t quit
after a couple months. Give it time to work. 6. Get feedback
from customers, friends, business associates, employees. Try to
find out WHO is seeing your message and HOW they are seeing it.
Always be willing to tweak and tune it as you go, based on
feedback. 7. Watch your revenue and your new customer activity.
Does it go up or down as you implement this marketing?
Remember, they key to getting more customers is to let more
people know who you are, what you can do for them and why they
should consider doing business with you. Focus your resources on
making sure your potential customers know you and remember you.
Then they will consider doing business with you.
If you focus too much on tracking, you can end up wasting time
and money on efforts do not build your business.
About the author:
Kevin Stirtz is the president of Coffee News Twin Cities LLC, a
national trainer and mentor for Coffee News USA and an online
marketing blogger/columnist for AllBusiness.com where he writes
"Better Local Marketing." He can be reached at www.BetterLocalMarketi
ng.com.
|
