Don’t believe people that say you can’t measure your marketing efforts. You can, and you should. Especially if you are spending additional time or money on marketing – you need to know if it’s working.
At the very least you should track where all your new enquiries come from. This can be a great indicator of which marketing activities are working better than others.
- Try and centralise the recording of all sales enquiries – they will typically come through by phone or email. If you don’t have a salesperson, try and make one person responsible for recording enquiries.
- Set up a dedicated email account if you haven’t already eg. sales@….. Then promote this in your marketing and route these emails to the person responsible for recording enquiries.
- Create a simple Excel spreadsheet that lists all the possible ways that somebody could hear about your company/products/services. eg. Yellow Pages advertisements; trade magazine advertisements; referrals/recommendations; networking activities; website; online marketing etc.
- Find out from potential customers how they got your phone number/email address or how they heard about you.
- Nowadays many people will say ‘your website’ but dig deeper and ask whether they knew your company name or not. This can indicate if they Googled generic search terms that led them to your company (hence your Search Engine Optimisation and/or Pay Per Click activities are working), or they Googled your company name (which they could have got from a recommendation, advertisement, media coverage etc).
You don’t want to interrogate your potential customers, but asking two simple questions is not unreasonable. It will give you useful information that you can use to measure and tweak future marketing activity.
