Did you know that you can have the best marketing – or the worst marketing – and not even know it? Yes, and I’ve seen it in action.
How does this happen?
It takes place in that murky hand-off from marketing to sales. It’s the phone call that comes into a business that goes into – what? A spreadsheet? An email to sales? Does someone ask that person on the phone how they found the company? What prompted them to call?
In most cases, the answer is “no.” And that’s where the marketing fails – in what I call the “back end” of the marketing system. Especially if you don’t have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in place.
Does this happen at your business? When you get a new person walking in the door – or landing on your website – filling in that “Contact Us” form – do you know where they came from? What prompted them to fill in the form? Or what sent them to your website in the first case?
If you don’t, then you are still in the dark about whether or not your marketing is worthwhile. If you can’t find out what is sending people to you, generating leads, or generating online sales, then you don’t know if what you’re doing is worthwhile or not.
Here’s how I typically see it work. Companies do all sorts of activities – sporadically, as they think of it or, most often, right before an important event (such as a conference). They send out emails, do social media posts announcing where they are going, how to find them (such as a booth number), and create flyers or brochures for the event. Then the event happens and they come back, exhausted, not sure if it works.
And then they may call people they met at the show. And they sit and wait to see what happens. There may be more activity to their website leading up to and during the show (if they’re paying attention to their website analytics). But this may or may not lead to more calls or inquiries.
And then they’re not sure if all of it was worth it. Because, as calls come in or people contact them by email, they’re not going back to that basic question, “How did you hear about us? What brought you here?” And businesses that get leads through phone calls can be caught up in this murky back-end process, not knowing how leads came to them.
If this sounds like what you’re doing now, you need to put systems (such as a CRM) into place that will close that fundamental gap. You need to know what it is you’ve done well or done right that brought new prospects to you (or had customers buy more from you).
This may include a question that everyone asks who picks up the phone at your location or the right coding for everyone who came to your website. It also can mean careful attention to your Google data, as well as tracking all your form emails.
At the end of the day, if you don’t have a system in place to understand how well your marketing is working for you – why even spend money on marketing? Need help with this? Feel free to contact me and we can chat.
