Are you tracking your marketing spend?
Marketing is all about testing and measuring. Putting out offers and seeing what the response is.
As such, I recently offered an on-line strategy audit to a group I was speaking to. A number of people instantly took me up on the offer (and why wouldn't they - it was free).
To participate, they needed to fill out a written questionnaire and I spent about half an hour on the phone going through their on-line strategy (or lack of it) with them.
And what an eye opener it's proved to be.
In a world where it's possible to test and track just about everything from where your traffic comes from to why they buy…
1. None had an overall online marketing strategy. Some were doing piecemeal stuff like individual blogs, video etc., but none had a comprehensive strategy.
2. Most didn't really know what is possible in the online marketing space.
3. Not one measures/controls the cost of their online marketing.
Now you may well fall into one of these categories, and that's okay. You're not alone and it's not your fault. There are just so many options and it's really quite difficult to sift through the sludge and pan for gold.
So just what is it you should be doing? How do you find the nuggets?
The following assumes you have a website which you're using to sell something - be it a service you provide or a product.
Number one on my list is figure out what people are typing in when looking for your product. And not just looking for information, but looking to buy. And there is a major difference.
After all, if you're paying for traffic (Google Adwords or Yahoo), you don't want to have people click your ads when they're just in the research phase. You want them hot and heavy with credit card in hand.
A quick example from a new client. She sells a digital ebook on setting up a house cleaning business.
Looking at her analytics most of her traffic comes from the USA and they're looking for a "house cleaner". So not looking to buy an ebook on setting up in the business of house cleaning.
So if she was advertising using the obvious words "house cleaning" or "house cleaner", she'd get taken to the cleaners herself with ad spend without any results.
Number two is to run some form of Analytics on your site. You can run Google Analytics - which is free - or a paid version.
In another recent example of not tracking, a client got "Google Slapped" - his cost per click went from an average of 15 cents/click to $7.80 / click. OUCH!
Why? Number of reasons - primarily he wasn't tracking conversions and what keywords were leading to sales and which ones weren't. And his sales page didn't have enough stuff on it for Google to give it a good "quality score". So you get priced out of the market as a punishment.
Analytics will tell you who's coming to your site, where they came from and what they typed to get there. You'll also be able to figure out "leaks" in your sales process - i.e. how many people go from your squeeze page (capturing name/email) to some other page on your site.
And third - test, test, test. You need to be testing headlines, sales copy, prices, links etc. All this can be automated too. Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing tool. i.e. you can test lots of different options at the same time.
But remember - none of this can be done in isolation. You need a strategy. The rest are tactics.
Rashid Kotwal is an international speaker and author who specializes in on-line and off-line strategies for direct response marketing and sales optimization. He works with sales organizations want to get more business, faster and with less wasted effort. You can find more information at
Sales & Marketing Consulting and
Get Clients Online Fast.
Copyright Rashid Kotwal.
