The Six Most
Important Words In Marketing
Marketing
professionals know that the most important part of a marketing
plan is tracking the return on
investment. When you spend time and money on a
marketing initiative, it is critical to track that
project's success (or failure) to determine how to best
allocate your marketing budget in the future.
So,
what are the Six Most Important Words in Marketing?
"How
did you hear about us?"
That's right, what
brings customers and clients to your business? Word
of mouth? Search engine listings? Walked
by and saw your place of business? Direct mail, print ads, cold
calls? What can you do to improve these initiatives to
enhance their return on investment. What
initiatives are missing from your list that you need to work
on?
When it comes to e-marketing, the rules change. If you
don't always directly interface with your clients, how can you
know how successful your e-marketing campaign is going?
The
"Six Words" In the Internet Era
With
e-marketing engaging potential clients without human contact,
it begs the question of how to track contacts via an
electronic medium.
Traffic
Reporting Software
Begin
by employing reliable web site traffic reporting
software. Many hosting companies offer a standard
package, but a more robust package will often provide more
critical marketing information.
E-Mail
Marketing
If
you use e-mail to contact customers or potential clients,
tracking is relatively easy.
More
and more e-mail marketers are tracking the "open
rate" of the messages they send. By including a
small bit of code in the e-mail marketing piece, marketers can
determine how many end users actually open the message
- and in a well managed list - who opened the message.
Many
e-mail marketing campaigns will employ "tracking
URL's" to monitor how many people use the e-mail message
to gain entry to their web sites. Special code is added
to links within the e-mail, and these links will appear as
separate entries on web site traffic reports. Each link
from an e-mail can have unique code added to it to indicate
which links an end user has followed.
Creating
unique target pages is another method that can be used
to track the "click thru" rates of an e-mail
marketing piece. From there, traffic that links into
your web site or storefront can be easily traced to monitor
the success of your message.
Search
Engine Marketing
Once
again, good traffic reporting software will help you manage the
success of a search engine marketing program. To track
"algorhythmic" or "organic" listings, reliable
traffic software can tell you which search engines are feeding you
traffic, what terms are being used by searchers to find your site,
and what pages they are seeing as their point of entry into your
web site.
Like
e-mail, tracking URLs can be used for Paid Listings Accounts in
instances when the search engines allow marketers to specify the
desired click-thru link.
"ASK!"
The
easiest way to find out how a customer or a qualified lead has
heard about you is to ask. Simple in theory, but often
difficult in practice.
Create
a culture of asking by encouraging frontline employees to monitor
this as part of their job.
Encourage
Feedback. There
are a variety of ways to encourage your clientele to provide
feedback. Use a questionnaire, suggestion drop box, or
contact clients directly to ask them what they like or don't
like about your business and services.
It's
never to late to ask either. Contact existing customers and
find out how they initially heard about your business. Be certain to
offer them something in return - people are more likely to
participate if they receive something in return.
Contests and coupons are another option to entice customers to
provide feedback or spread the word about your offerings.
Offer referral incentives to encourage word of mouth, or send
special discounts to new clients to encourage their continued
business. As marketing initiatives go, the bottom line
is to discover - "what works and what doesn't!"
© Copyright 2004, Lunavista
Communications Corp. All Rights Reserved.
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