Stop with the hope marketing!
Hope marketing is just putting some stuff out there and hoping for the best. Wishful thinking at best. It’s no way to build a sustainable lead generation funnel for your small business and it’s no way to live life really.
Once we begin to make small business marketing decisions with real data in hand we’ll feel confident about where to invest our limited resources.
Here’s a few simple things you can measure today!
Website Analytics (Traffic, etc.)
If you haven’t hooked up Google analytics to your site, do it today! At minimum it can give you the baseline traffic information you need to see if you’re website changes are making a difference. If you go a step deeper you can get a handle on all kinds of demographic info, most popular content, bounce rates, navigation tendencies.
Email Opt-in rates
If you’re growing your email list through embedded email opt-in forms or pop-ups, you can get helpful information about the opt-in rates for all of your forms. The handy plugin we use gives us all the information we need to make ongoing changes to better serve our clients. We also have the ability to run A/B test on these forms to continually optimize the images, text and incentives we use.
Yelp Business Ads
Most of our storefront businesses understand the value of Yelp as more and more customers are searching local listings before getting in their car. With Yelp Business Ad’s you can get exact information on number of impressions and number of clicks on your ad. This will give you a real sense if you’re advertising dollars are well spent on Yelp.
Facebook Ads
Facebook advertising is an incredibly powerful (although daunting) tool. If you’re willing to put in the work to develop a Facebook marketing funnel, narrow down your target audience and test run Facebook ads, the service will provide all the analytics you need to make decisions about which ads are converting to lead and which ones need to be cut. Be warned this best done with an investment mindset over a couple of months to find the right combo of ad copy and content that works for your niche.
The best marketing decisions are made with real information.
Don’t just try something to try something, but consider how you can learn more about your customers from key analytics attached to the strategy you’re using.
Get your marketing process in gear and continuously optimize.
Build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn!