Not Testing Your Marketing Strategies

One of the worst things you can do is to fall in love with your product, service or marketing plan. Because you spend so much time developing your ideal marketing plan your objectivity can often go right out the window.

Don’t get blinded by how well you “think” your marketing tactics will pay off.

Even with extensive research, nothing is certain. The real key is how the market responds to your efforts and offers. The marketing plan help you achieve results that you can measure.

Before you invest large amounts of time, money or effort in any marketing or sales promotion you should test the effectiveness of your campaign. That way if it doesn’t work the way you thought it would or should, you haven’t wasted unnecessary resources.

By monitoring results and by testing your marketing tactics you will be able to your sales promotion into a huge success, boost sales and increase business revenue.

Testing is never complete. You should always be testing something different to see if you can get better results. Testing is such an important part of every successful marketing effort to get customers and increase sales

This simple strategy will help you maximise your returns, minimise your costs in time, money and effort, and add significantly to your bottom line.

Don’t fall in love with your marketing plan so much that you can’t be objective.

And don’t spend too much time trying to analyse and figure out why a particular thing works and why another doesn’t. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is what. Put small test runs out into the market and let your customers tell you what works and what doesn’t. That’s how you will grow your business with marketing plan.

Failure To Monitor Your Results

Results. That’s all that matter in business. Results.

Any promotion that’s worth putting your time, money and effort into, is worth measuring how well it performs. The only way you can know whether the promotion is worth running again or what you may need to do to change or tweak it to make it more effective  is by knowing the results the marketing effort produced. Did you get more prospects? Did they convert to more customers?

It’s astounding how many business owners don’t understand this simple concept.

You’ll let the local newspaper advertising salesperson sell you an ad and layout the ad, because they are “the experts” then let them run it with no way of knowing whether or not anyone called or a customer was obtained as a result of the ad. These “institutional” bran type agencies love you, because you have no idea whether the investment has worked, and they are in no way accountable, and they will keep selling you more and more, because “you have to advertise regularly” to be effective. Ha!

The ad has no accountability or measurability.  So next week or next month, they convince you to run it again and you continue to complain about how bad business is.

As a smart business person, you should never consider running an ad or executing a mailing campaign or promotion without having some type of response mechanism to measure the results. However, it happens every day. And millions of dollars are wasted because of it. If you want grow your business, you need to be smarter.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your ads will create some kind of magical awareness of your product or service. Every one of your ads and mailings and sales promotions must have a definite, targeted purpose. And EVERY How To Improve Sales must be measured to see that it does achieve that purpose.

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Here’s a simple 4-step system you can set up to measure the results of every advertising or marketing tactic you implement to promote your business:

1. Put together an “Advertising and Promotion Results Analysis”book. A simple 2 ring binder works well for this.

2. On the inside of the binder, insert a few clear plastic page protectors.

3. Print out a few copies of the “Advertising and Promotion Results Analysis” form shown in Part 2 of Mistake #2, and insert one in each of the page protectors facing the back of the binder.

Every time you run an ad or Improve sales, put a copy of that ad or promotion in one of the page protectors facing the opposite direction of the Analysis form. If you do this every time you run an advertisement, or promote your business and you carefully analyse the results, you’ll quickly see which promotions are working, which ones need tweaking to improve, and which you should toss out ASAP.

As your binder grows, make three additional binders.

In one binder place all your “A” ads and sales letters – the ads that pulled the best.

In another binder, place the ads and letters that produced marginal results, or at least broke even; you could experiment with these in the future. And in the third binder, put all the “losers.” The ads and letters that absolutely bombed, which you want to stay away from in future.

This way when you are ready to do another Improve sales or want to boost sales you’ll know which ads or letters you can depend on to model the next promotion.