Why bother with a marketing report?
A question for you. Two actually.
- 1.
- Is your marketing working for you?
- 2.
- How do you know?
See, most business owners often know the answer to the first question (and it’s usually “no”), but get stuck when it comes to answering the second.
They know they’re not making the money they’d like to make... but they’re not sure how they can trace this back to their marketing not working.
And why is this?
It’s because they don’t understand how important it is to have a marketing report detailing exactly how and where their marketing is doing well... and where it’s doing not so well.
Sometimes business owners seem to be a bit fed up when I get strict with them about their marketing pieces. After all, direct response marketing is hard work. It takes thought and effort. More important, it inevitably gives us some failures, and they can be hard to take. It’s not so much they’re expensive as they can be just, well... demoralising.
But these small mistakes (small because we test!), are far less demoralising than the BIG failure we get if we just rush headlong into a marketing campaign our marketing report would have told us was a bad idea... if we had the marketing report in front of us!
So be sure to include a tracking mechanism in all your marketing pieces, even if it takes a little extra time, effort, and money to make it happen. For example, in a print-ad you can send readers to a dedicated website or landing page you never use for any other purpose: that way anyone hitting that site you know must have come from your ad. Yes, it’s a little extra bother to register the domain, put the page up, and put the data into your marketing report, but the information you get from the exercise far outweighs that small inconvenience.
Why?
Because you can tell with one glance how effective that ad was. If you’ve tied sales to leads, you can tell instantly how much business that one ad brought you. If the ROI was positive, then you can be confident if you run the ad again, you’ll get a similar result.
Yes, I know it’s a bother thinking about headlines, body copy, calls to action, response mechanisms and tracking and testing, but in the long run it pays us back many times over.
So don’t duck out from under the extra “hassle”: the marketing report is your friend, and will make you a lot of money and save you a lot of heartache... but only if you use it!
That’s an overview of the marketing report and why you need one for every strategy you implement. Take a look around the rest of this site, and get into some of the detailed marketing strategies you can put to work for you right now and have them making money for you by tomorrow!
Happy Marketing!
Chris Cardell
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