Keep From Crippling Your Business With These Marketing Mistakes Day 2 Dave Negri 244

We're on day two of keeping from crippling your business with these 20 marketing mistakes. So, we're on day two. mistake number two is failure to monitor your results. Don't track. In other words, your tracking sucks. Results -- That's all that counts in business-- is results. You want to track results. We're going to have day three, four and five but today marketing mistake number two. Before I get to that, remember if you stick around 'til day 5, the end of day five we'll have the 60-page free report for you. It's not just report, it's a workbook to help you get through everything that we talked about this week in this series, to help you make your business better so that you can have the lifestyle that you have been working for to make it easier. You want to automate it and grow it. So, let's just make that happen. So today marketing mistake number two is failure to monitor your results. Don't track. In other words, your tracking sucks. Results -- That's all that counts in business-- is results. You want to track the results. Any promotion worth putting your time into -- your money, your effort behind -- is worth measuring how well it performs. That's tracking. Only by knowing what kinds of results a certain marketing effort produces can you determine whether or not to run it again. You don't want to throw good money after bad or what you may need to do to change or tweak in order to make it more creative. So, in order to make it more creative, you have to know how it works. Remember, I think it was a couple episodes back. The numbers will set you free. This is part of those numbers is tracking. So, it's absolutely amazing how many business owners don't understand this simple concept. "Well, it takes too much time. I don't know to do it." But you'll know how to go out of business when everything comes crashing down though what the Yellow Page advertising salesperson sell them an ad in their local phonebook or better yet they'll have some coarse Yellow Pages is really coming back. Some people are using great abundance. So, don't laugh when I said Yellow Pages but in other ways some social media expert will tell you that you need to spend thousands of dollars on Facebook ads. Why? You need to track them to find out why and how they work. They're in the business of selling advertising. You're in the business of selling your business. Your goods and your services. That's what we're trying to do is teach you some of the things about marketing so that you can effectively learn how to not necessarily do it yourself but know the background and the core differences and what it takes to do it. But we're going back into I'm getting away from things. Whether or not, you want to know whether or not, a prospect call or customers obtain is a result of a particular marketing had. The ad has no accountability and or measurability. So next year, at the same ad gets run, the same results are had and the business owners continued complaining about how poor business is. But you're not going back to find out why how the reasons why business is so bad. And it's saying the same thing happens when we do any magazine ad. Welcome the magazine ad or direct mail campaign. I know some guys are doing Val pack and successfully and other. There's all kinds of types of marketing. The key is that an astute business person, you should never ever, even consider, running an ad or executing a mailing campaign or promotion without having some type of response mechanism to measure the results. My philosophy is I can't track it. I don't do it. It's as simple as that. You wouldn't think of ordering and paying for product--any kind of product--and then not checking to see if it was received. Well, that's the same thing when you're marketing. You're ordering a product, you're sending it out but you're not seeing how well it was received. So that's what the tracking is all about. Many business owners in the whole run ads and their papers, magazines, money mailers, whatever the case may be, sent out a mailing and never bother to see what kind of results the ad produced. I know. I know it's crazy but it happens every day and millions of dollars are wasted because of it. And maybe you've done it. In the beginning I did it. I don't do it anymore. I said if I can't track and they can't get down, I refuse to do it. Some people even go as far to say "Well, my advertising isn't to bring in customers right away." Well that's kind of stupid. I'm sorry to say that. Its purpose to keep my name in front of our prospects, trade top of mind awareness, so that when they're ready, they'll remember me. You are not Coca-Cola. You are not Wal-Mart. You don't have billions of dollars to spend and throwing your name out into the marketplace. You want trackable results today. As soon as it goes out. Top of the mine awareness is important. But you know what, you're top of mind awareness--I'm going to be honest with you--Needs to be to your paying customers so they remember who you are on a consistent basis so that they don't go to your competition because they forgot who you are. There's no question that you need to have top of mind awareness but you can't afford to operate your business on deferred results. And that's what that is. So, you want top of mind awareness? Let's go back to your current customers or even people you've given a proposal to. Keep them top of mind. Keep them in your funnel. Maybe we'll do business with you in the future. Each one of your ads and mailings got to have to have a definite targeted purpose. And each ad must be measured to see that it is in fact does accomplish that purpose. And we'll talk more about that and later section. But for now, here's the simple forced system you can go and set up to measure the results of each and every advertising promotion campaign you run from now on. Put together an advertising promotion results analysis book. Simple three pages bind you can work well for this or just to make up a spreadsheet but put it into a binder. On one side of the binder, insert a few clear plastic page redactors. Print up some copies advertising and promotion result analysis forms found on the page of the report that we're going to give to you in episode number five. But make up your own right now and every time you run an ad or promotion, print a copy of the ad or the promotion and put it in and tape it to the page facing in the opposite direction analysis form--how many calls did you get? What kind of response? What the sales were for that particular ad?" Then in one Binder, place all your ads and sales letters. That is the as polls the best. And another binder place ads and letters that goes to marginal results or at least broke even. And then a third binder put all the losers. These are ads and letters that absolutely bombed. They sucked. They didn't get no responses. Then when you get ready to do another promotion or mailing you know which ads or letters that you can depend on or at least which ones you can model the next promotion after. Now, regarding the third binder. Well stay away from the ads and then Binder. Those ads have already proven to you that they you won't want to run them again. So, stay away from. But in the second binder--the one that has a marginal break even adds or letters--That's the one that you may want to experiment with. Look over the ads and see what may have gone wrong. It could be spelling just the way words are worded in a particular order. Just one little tweak could make a big monumental difference just because they as a nose didn't make a big profit or get the big response that you would have liked. Of course, and hardly ever is there anything to get the response that you would like. You have to continue to tweak and make better because it's a continual process. Once you get it to where it's pulling then you'll leave it then you may want to test another section or another targeted area. But the sometimes a little tweaking like that and adjusting can turn a mediocre ad into the real result producer. So, by doing this, I hope you see the advantage of doing this by having a copy of the ad or the promotion or the results they produce in a central place. It makes developing your next promotion so much easier. No more guessing, no wondering, what has to be done but keep track. Tracking is everything. Not only will you save time but it will be a proven winner. And make life so much easier. There's a 2 percent response 3 percent response. The difference will make all the difference in profits to you running the ad and promotion costs the same while it pulls 2 percent or 3 percent. But the actual one percent is a 50 percent increase response rate. Let me say that again the difference between a two percent response rate and a 3 percent response rate is a 50 percent increase in response rate. Don't think of it's just a 1 percent is a 50 percent increase and that 50 percent increase can mean tons of profit. A marketing mistake number three, not testing your marketing strategies. One of the worst things that we as business owners can do is a form of our products or our services or even our marketing strategy. Oftentimes we spend so much time developing the ideal program are the ideal strategy that we get so close to it that our objectivity goes right out the window. It's important not to get blinded by how well we think our marketing efforts will pay off. Even with all the necessary research in place nothing is certain. The real key is how the market responds to our efforts and our offers. So, before you invest at any significant amount of time, money or effort in any marketing or promotional effort. It's smart and wise to test the effectiveness of your campaign that way if it doesn't work the way you thought it would or should have said necessarily or unnecessarily resources. Here's a couple of examples to illustrate that point. Let's say that you want to do a direct mail campaign to 20000 homes in a certain radius around your business so you read a list of home owners. You print up all the pieces, have someone stuffed the envelopes, fix the postage, haul them down to the post office. Then you sit back and wait for the calls and orders come in. Same thing with eddm. You're going to go through the same process. It's just not going to be as labor intensive but after a couple of weeks you look at the results and you find that you have only received 19 responses and you quickly take out the calculator you figure out how figures that you just pulled whopping point 0 0 0 9 5 percent. At that point I would be angry and frustrated. But it doesn't sound like a good return on your investment does it. Well it's not but sadly that's the way that most businesses operate. But now let's suppose instead of all those 20000 pieces being identical you melt at the same time you decide only to mail 5000 the first time and let's say you came up with five different approaches or five different ideas and you can even bring it down to hundreds. You know you want to do deal 500. But I've found that when you are measuring and testing the it's nice around a thousand. So if you do you know 200 200 200 and 200 you will get your results. But that's just what I found. You might be able to do better with less. I don't know. So now you go to the printer you have let's say you're going to do the 5000. Let's see. You go the printer and you have 1000 of each idea printed and then you mail them and after a couple of weeks by monitoring the results you noticed that idea number three had the best response. You had 12 orders. So, it's not--so not a great response--but far better, then the other's letters combined and you have not, only not spent a ton of money on your marketing campaign but you haven't tipped your hand to the other people that wanted to send out with an ad it doesn't work. So, now let's go back to the drawing board and find tune the letter that pulled the best response and make the headline more attention grabbing the benefit, the reader and gain more appealing and the offer more attractive then sent it to another thousand names. Ah, this time you get the letter. The post 47 responses or the postcard that's four-point seven percent response. Not bad in anybody's book. But you've only used six thousand of your original 20000 names you have 14000 left. Now the interesting thing--and we're probably going to is at a later time. But if you send out a three-step letter, it'll increase your odds. It'll increase your percentage of your response rate. But let's go back to staying on task here you still have 14000 left. Now you have a control letter by tweaking the letter again and you may find that it pulls even better. If it does, then this letter or postcard or marketing piece becomes what we call the control. Just because you got 20000 names doesn't mean you have to mail the same piece to all of them at the same time. That's what most businesses do. And that's why so many of them have given up on direct mail because they haven't dissected it. They haven't taken a look at it. They haven't played with it to get the responses they want. So, once you get a letter that's pulling well, keep mailing it. In short run, always trying to be the control letter. So, don't slam bang it. But do it in control runs. Do you see what has just happened? -- By monitoring the results, by testing your mailing, you were able to come to a complete flop of promotion into a huge, huge success. You're testing is never complete. Just because you run a couple of different tests doesn't mean you stop testing. Should always be testing something different to see if you can be the control. So, I know right now a lot of you are saying "Man! That's a lot of stick in work that I have to do." Well, you know it's work is going to bring business. And if you don't, it'll put you out of business. I know it's pain, but we've got to keep on things too. We've got to create a system so the business the system systems run our business. That's really what it's all about. You want the lifestyle that you were dreamed about when you created your business and you haven't gotten there yet. These systems will help you get there faster, more productively and more in a straight line than it will if you just throw mud up against the wall and that's what most people do with their marketing is throw mud up against the wall. That's without testing and measuring. So, like you said your testing is never complete. For instance, suppose you're doing a direct mail piece of residents and you want to know whether you should use an envelope with teaser or a plain white envelope. The answer can be found by testing. And here's one way you might do it splits your audience into two--group A and group B that can be arranged by zip codes. Group A will be consisting of an address and services group who will have addresses in different steps group A will have teased or copy on the envelope and group B will have in a plain white plain white envelope. So just for the fun of it to let you know I've used paper bags. I just want to get it open so it works. You just have to keep testing and see what works. It's important if the content in the envelopes be exactly the same because if the test is going to be accurately measured you can only have one verbal at a time. And in this case, it's the different envelopes. Now when your responses or orders come in you simply keep track of the zip codes that they came from so you'll know very quickly which envelope pose the best. This is assuming of course the various zip codes are consistent with similar demographics--similar demographics the same type of people. Once you've determined which delivery system is best you can go on and test other components of your mouth. Some things that are worthy of testing-- just a couple of things-- Headlines, sub headline, super heads or press headlines bold body capping bullet points or statements the offer of the price guarantee a return policy whether or not you use graphics which graphics pull best drawings. The list goes on. Pictures of people I knew one guy that used pretty people in all this marketing and he was a window cleaner and got excellent results. If your marketing can't be segregated by zip codes you can use specially coded coupons or response card. Use different codes for different variables for testing. You might even use different phone numbers and we've talked about that in other podcast some businesses have responded. Ask for a specific person or department. So, for instance you asked for Susan, you'll know that they're responding to one particular offer. If they ask for Heather, they are inquiring about the same offer but with a different variable being tested. So, just keep testing when the phone is answered in the car d says ask for Susan. Please say "I'm sorry, Susan it's not available right now. But, can I help you?" So, you told the truth she isn't available and if you are able to keep them, what what's more you've identified which offer is calling and I don't what piece of marketing that you're responding to. Testing is everything. These are just simple strategies here. What you do ever-- Or whatever you do -- don't fall in love with your project. You need to be objective. Don't spend too much time trying to analyze and figure out why a particular thing works or why another doesn't, simply doesn't matter why. What matters is what works. A small test can run into the marketplace and let your customers tell you what works and what doesn't. So again, don't make the mistakes. Don't fall in love with it. Just test it and measure it. And then you want to follow. Tomorrow we're going to go into number four. Not taking massive action. So, and 5 and 6 if we've got time. Remember, on day 5 stick around we're going to have the hole. Actually, the whole workbook and free report for you guys keep keeping from crippling your business with these marketing mistakes as a download on day 5. So, you'll get this whole thing. You can walk through it. You can take notes you can scribble on it. So, it will help you grow your business much farther. There are so many ways to do almost free marketing you just have to think about it or you could just go to the web site and pick up the free download. 4 Hot Marketing Strategies That Can Flood Your Business with Customers If you have a story to tell and would like to be a guest on this podcast email my assistant Shell at [email protected]   and she will send you our guest sheet.   Our sponsors Would you like your phone to ring more with qualified buyers people looking to buy now? Then let’s make that happen. 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