ARTICLE
You have just made a huge investment in an ad space. It doesn’t matter if it is a web page, a newspaper, or a yellow page ad. How can you tell if it is a winner?
You have to track how many sales came in from the ad.
Most small business owners who have a marketing budget just use total amount spent on marketing and compare total sales to the budget. If you make money then your marketing dollar is effective.
If you are doing this you could be throwing away tons and tons of money. This money may cost you your business life.
How?
Take a business who spends $1000 each on 4 ads for a total of $4000 annual as an example.
At the end of the year he finds out his ads brought in $20,000 in revenue from these four ads.
Your average business owner will consider this effective marketing.
If you are concerned about your business then you will hold your marketing accountable on an individual basis.
Let’s go back to the 4 ads to illustrate this:
Ad 1 brings in $0 in sales.
Ad 2 brings in $ 500 in sales.
Ad 3 brings in $18,500 in sales.
Ad 4 brings in $1,000 in sales.
You have now discovered by studying your marketing individually:
Ad 1 should be used only as an example of what not to use and thrown away.
Ad 2 might be able to be tweaked and seen if it can become profitable…might be able to be saved
Ad 3 is a big winner and should be run in the other marketing sources you are using.
Ad 4 is breaking even and you can choose to keep this going if the new customer is worth more in profit on future purchases. You can also decide to tweak it and see if you can make it more profitable.
The lesson here is if you are not itemizing your marketing dollar and holding them accountable for sales individually then you may be throwing away good money and more importantly losing out on profits.
Is this reinventing the wheel? No, this has been used since the days of Claude Hopkins who was responsible for taking Schlitz Beer from the number 6 most profitable beer to the number one position in six months. You can read about this in the classic book Scientific Advertising/My Life In Advertising by Claude Hopkins.
