There is a recession and you need to cut the costs in your business. It won’t hurt to cut the marketing budget will it? Well actually it will. Think about it your business is suffering and you are doing less business and your margins are under pressure. If you cut your marketing spend the effect is going to be that you will do even less business which will make the situation even worse. Once you start to cut the budget the effect of this will exacerbate the problem in your business and you will do even less business. Then what do you do? Cut the marketing budget again? The solution is to spend your marketing money more wisely.
Most businesses spend money on marketing and only 10% of the advertising is effective and 90% is wasted. The problem is that a lot of businesses don’t know what part of the advertising spend is effective. This can be solved by using tracking on all the advertising that is done so you are able to measure the results and adjust the advertising spend so that it is spent more wisely.
In virtually every area of business it is possible to track and monitor your advertising. When advertising in traditional mediums such as papers, magazines, leaflets, yellow pages etcetera it is possible to use a unique phone number for each of them. You can also advertise different discount codes in each of the sources which the customer then uses at the checkout when they visit your website. Also if they come into your bricks and mortar store they can redeem this in store. Another possibility is to offer the customer a voucher that they can only access by sending a text message to receive a voucher code back by text which can then be redeemed.
When you do online marketing using Pay Click advertising on Google, Bing, Yahoo or some other second tier advertising network it is possible to use online tracking software to track all of the traffic that you receive. So you are then able to see which words produce the traffic and which don’t. Then it is also possible to see which words are converting into sales.
It is also advisable to capture as much information as you can about your customers such as their Name, Address, Home Phone Number, Mobile Phone number, Email address. With this information you will be able to do the traditional mailshots though the post as well as text marketing using the mobile phone number and also with the email addresses you can send promotion details to all of your customers. Again all of this marketing should be tracked so you make sure that you spend your money wisely. All of this is worth doing if it can be done profitably especially when you consider that the easiest people to sell to are your existing customers.
Once you are able to measure which part of you marketing is working you can then start to spend the part that isn’t working properly more wisely. The effects of doing this will be that your advertising will become more productive so you get more out the same spend. It is also important to split test your advertising so you measure the effect of changes using the same control conditions. As you optimise your advertising over time and eliminate the sources that aren’t working and you replace them with more effective sources you will be able to not only compensate for the effect of the recession but increase the amount of business that you do from the same marketing spend. So as you can see it is very important to measure all aspects of your advertising activity.
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