5 Steps to Improve Your Marketing

Here is an easy and essential process to improve your marketing! Many users might describe their experience with marketing to be frustrating, expensive, and even useless. And it’s easy to understand why.

Buying an ad isn’t like a lot of other purchases we make. For example: to buy cardboard boxes, you go to your seller, hand them some cash, get handed an armful of boxes, and walk away. Buying an ad – especially a digital ad – is different. You sit at your computer, pay some money, and… you wait. And hope something happens.

What if there was a better way? What if you could tell whether or not your marketing is effective and get better at it?

These 5 easy steps can help you do just that – and might be the key to taking your business to the next level!

1. Establish Your Objectives

Setting out clear and concise objectives can make all the difference – it’s fundamental to know if your marketing is working or not! Let’s pretend you’re buying leads through an agency like USA Home Listings. You’ll get leads and send postcards, and contact individuals who are planning to move. It’s great stuff, and it usually feels like the right decision. But how do you know? By setting a goal and objectives. Otherwise, you risk failing to identify when your marketing isn’t working!

So when you make a marketing purchase: Write down your objectives! Why are you making this purchase? Is your goal to increase your sales by 5% this year? Get 12% More phone calls this week?

Don’t be afraid of being wrong. Just be clear and specific about what you want to happen from this purchase. It changes the feeling that you are making an intangible purchase into the feeling that you are setting an achievable goal.

What does a good goal look like?

We recommend using SMART Goals as guidelines.

Specific – 15%, 12%, $10,000 – Use numbers and outcomes when writing your goals!

Measurable – There will be more on this later, but write down an action that will happen as a result of this purchase. Will leads call you? Email you? Book jobs with you?

Achievable – Be realistic. Understand that there are very few marketing initiatives that will increase your sales by 50%. If you get 12% more booked jobs as a result of your marketing, remember that it’s 12% more than you would have gotten otherwise.

Relevant – If you get your trucks wrapped with your email address, don’t expect more phone calls.

Time Bound – Set a start and end time. More on this later, but establishing time frames is the only way you can successfully measure performance.

Here’s an example: “By signing up with Oncue I will increase my booked jobs by 33%, take two weeks off this Summer, and buy another truck.”

When you make a marketing purchase, always ask yourself: “Why?”

2. Know Your Limits

You have to spend money to make money. Almost any good business owner can tell you this, and it’s an idea that movers are extremely familiar with. But how much is too much? The US Small Business Administration recommends spending 7-8% of your gross revenue on marketing, varying industry-to-industry, and situation-to-situation.

Our advice is to evaluate your comfort level based on this number and then follow the next steps!

3. Keep Track

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Set up more than one opportunity for customers to tell you where they came from, and don’t hesitate to ask for clarity! Make it routine to have your sales reps ask how your customers found you. The results might surprise you.

Businesses feel frustrated when they invest in their marketing because they’re not seeing results, and they’re not seeing results because they’re not asking for them!

4. Calculate ROI

This is crucial. Not every marketing resource is created equal. Always calculate – don’t guess – your Return On Investment.

Use your tracking and spending data to understand how much you’re getting back on each marketing initiative. If you spent $500 on Google display ads, had 10 customers say that is how they found you, 2 of them booked jobs, and those jobs were valued at $1500 / each, you can figure out how much revenue (or potential revenue) Google Adwords is generating for you. You can calculate your ROI by dividing the amount spent by your desired outcome. In this case:

$500 / 10 potential customers = $50 / lead

$500/ 2 customers = $250 / job

$1500/ $500 = $3 return for every $1 spent

Is it what you want? Could this money be spent better elsewhere? That’s for you to decide. You should base that decision on step 1 and your marketing trends.

5. Test Constantly

Every step of this process was leading up to this. You need to test and adjust your marketing constantly. Sometimes it’s not the platform. Sometimes it’s the content.

Consider mailers – there’s a difference between a good postcard and a bad postcard. You need to constantly test how and what you’re saying to see what works and what doesn’t. Was your logo too big or too small? Was your phone number on both sides? Did you give a clear call to action? Was it the correct call to action? 

All of this matters, and it directly affects how well your marketing performs. Try different colors, fonts, messages, images, and layouts with your marketing, see what works best, and then test again!

Conclusion

Set your objectives, know your limits, keep track, calculate your ROI, and test constantly. If you take these steps consistently, your marketing will improve!

If you’re looking for a way to keep track of all of this, take a look at Oncue’s software – it’s a CRM that lets you track your business, schedule automatic follow-ups, and even take a vacation! Get a free demo!