As a business owner, you’ve probably heard the phrase “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” meaning you need goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) to know how well your employees are performing. But here’s a new spin on that phrase that’ll save you even more time, money, and frustration:
You shouldn’t market what you can’t measure.
That means you should never do any marketing if you can’t track the results.
You might be doing it now. For example, you know you should send out marketing emails, but as a business owner with limited time, you blast your entire list and hope for the best. Or you get a great deal on door hangers so you pay some high school kid to spread them out across the neighborhood.
Those are great ways to waste a lot of time and money, and if you’re like me, you don’t have room to do either.
So here’s why this is so important:
1) It’s wasting money: Without measurement, it’s difficult to determine the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts. This makes it challenging to justify spending on certain campaigns or channels. And if you don’t know whether something is working, you could be wasting valuable money and time and taking away from efforts that would actually bring in customers.
2) Lack of Optimization: Measurement allows for continuous optimization of marketing strategies. Without data, you’re essentially operating in the dark and may miss out on opportunities to improve performance.
3) Difficulty in Targeting: Measuring audience response and engagement helps in refining who you should be marketing to. I remember a story about a brilliant marketing consultant who, through a series of marketing tests, discovered that the best customer for a mail order bride business and a client of his was truck drivers who didn’t have time to date. Once the company started increasing their marketing to those customers, business quadrupled.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I can’t tell which half.”
The above quote is from marketing pioneer and inventor of the department store, John Wanamaker, at the turn of the 20th century. But it’s just as true today. The companies that spend millions of dollars airing fun and witty halftime commercials know they’re wasting half their money, but since they have money to spare, they can afford to engage in some brand building.
Do you have money to spare? Me either.
So instead, make sure every piece of advertising or email you send has a way for you to track performance, whether it’s a trackable 1-800 number, a clickable link that goes to a landing page on your website, or a simple process process at point of sale where you or your employees are asking customers how they found you.
In fact, you’re better off if you do all three.