5 Tips to Marketing with Confidence in 2010

Are you 100% confident in knowing that you’re making a profit on every marketing and advertising campaign you pursue? With advancements in technology, tracking and quantifying activity in your campaign is no longer impossible.

Granted, we can’t tell how long someone looks at your direct mail piece, or how many times they pick it up or if they even pick it up at all, or where their eyes travel as they peruse your glossy tri-fold brochure, or if they hand your mail piece to a friend, etc.

However, through the use of the Internet you can harvest overwhelming amounts of information through your website such as: how are visitors getting to your website; how long do visitors stay on your website; which pages within your website are visitors going to the most, and from which pages are they leaving; how many visitors are contacting your office either by phone, by email, or by web form submission; which referring sources (or marketing campaigns) are producing the best website visitors; and so on.

There are various things you need to do to track everything I just described above and most of them are simple that you can start adopting immediately!

1. Install Google Analytics within your web pages. You should install the tracking code on all your pages, setup goal funnels, add click tracking to your calls to actions and main action buttons such as clicking to send an email, etc. Google Analytics is free (at the time of writing this article), and the information it collects can be analyzed and reported in many ways!
2. Use a unique phone number with every main marketing campaign you run. You can take this as far as you’d like to gain as much insight as you feel is necessary. You should have a unique phone number on your website, unique number on your direct mail piece, unique number in the phone book, unique number on your vehicle wrap, unique number on the billboard, unique number in your radio advertisement, even a unique number on the landing page of your Pay-Per-Click campaign! I often get resistence from clients when I talk about “changing” their phone number. But if you think about it, the first time a prospect customer learns about your company they wouldn’t know any other phone number! There are many companies that offer unique phone numbers and call tracking services. Some services even offer call recording so you can quality assure how the calls are handled!
3. Look at your site statistics provided by your host. Although Google Analytics is thorough, it doesn’t capture requests where the Analytics tracking code is not installed. This is where your host statistics will improvise and provide vital information.
4. Use unique URLs in your printed advertisments. Sending them to a URL that is unique will be picked up by your Google Analytics tracking code, or your host site statistics.
5. Use discount/referral codes in your checkout process or inquiry forms. Use a different code for unique campaigns. If you have referral partners, this method enables you to track sales through your site so you can reward your partners with the commissions they earned. There are ways to automate passing the code so to avoid dependence on the end user who doesn’t really care about your referral partner, but does care about getting their discount!

That’s a handful of methods to help you start quantifying your opportunities and matching up the numbers with your various campaigns. Once you’ve started quantifying, then with confidence you can make adjustments to existing campaigns, try new things, or stop campaigns that aren’t producing based on the numbers!

It’s one thing to quantify, but it does absolutely nothing for your business if you’re not compiling the information into readable charts and reports that actually mean something, analyzing the information, and comparing with the numbers you had before.

At first, reporting will be cumbersome, and will produce either sparse information or eye opening insight! Regardless, keep looking at the numbers consistently. Watch for trends, make adjustments to improve, see the impact the changes have on your numbers.

If you want to be like those that answered “YES!” to my first question, then it’s imperative that you start quantifying. Doing so could mean the difference between burning thousands of dollars a month on your yellow page ad, or reaping the harvest of the dollars you invest with confidence into your Internet Marketing campaign.

Are you quantifying? What techniques have you found to be effective in quantifying? What marketing strategies have worked best in your world?

Or, if you just started quantifying because of this article, tell us how you’ve benefited from quantification.