Accountable Marketing

In order to have a properly managed business, it is necessary to manage all aspects of the business. It is common for the average small businessman to have a computer to maintain records of sales, customer base information and expenditures. We spend lots of money to count our beans and get trained on the latest methods of the best ways to so do. However, my perspective says that getting the beans in the first place is Game One. You’ve got to have something to count, or that expensive hardware, software, and training is not only impotent, but also, probably not able to be paid for! ”Nothing happens until a sale is made!” There have not been very many places to go to get a full view of the marketing options, and thus the importance of measuring the different choices to test and monitor. What all this is pointing to is the importance of measuring the fruits of every effort to acquire business. Even if you use only ”location” or ”newspaper” advertising, it is paramount for you to ask, ”how did you hear about me?” Otherwise, you have no useful information to manage. I know a cooling contractor who set up his computers so that every incoming call had to have the ”how did you hear about us” response entered into the blank or the person taking the information could not advance on the screen. What a deal! He has complete information on how many referrals, , radio, direct mail and phone book responses he gets, and when they came in. He could see that 15 call-ins around 12:00 from the radio ad (that ran at 12:00) were the direct result of that ad. What a tool! Then he would change the ad, to test possible improvements, and measure the difference. Now that’s accountable marketing! Marketing has not been the strong suit of most small businesses. People, by nature, do not like to attempt things that they don’t know much about or are not very skilled at doing. However, is there any part of your business responsibilities more important than controlling your income? ”You can’t effectively change something that you can’t measure” is worth considering, with the priority and resources attributed to other parts of your business.

If your product or service has repeat business potential, there are some numbers and facts that you should be aware of that can affect your level of prosperity. The Numbers: I was testing a telemarketing script that I had created for a service business that depends on regular repeat business. They gave me a customer list that was about 5 years old, and I started by calling number 0001. What I found was that over 45% of their ”customers” weren’t! The phone numbers were no longer any good. It wasn’t poor record-keeping - the numbers had changed. 45% in five years means that 9% per year were no longer part of the customer base. The Facts: The reason for this is that they either move or pass away! This percentage is probably 2% to 3% above average, but the point is, if you’re standing still, you’re sinking! In addition to losses from moves and deaths, another variable is losses to the competition. This is why game one in the ”Marketing Battle Plan” is to stop the losses to the competition by doing market research to determine how you are doing with your ”customer base.” It’s easy; the percentage of ”pirated” losses can be anywhere from 2% to 20%, depending on the quality of your services versus the quality and aggressiveness of Brand X. There are contractors who subcontract for national chain stores who relate that ads run with a major store’s name pull twice as much as the same ad with their unfamiliar company name. Customer base telemarketing is also about twice as effective, at least, as calls to strangers. Especially now that your competitors are not allowed to legally call consumers.

What this means is, your customers are valuable to you. First, because they will hopefully call or visit you; second, because you can proactively advertise what you want to them with more predictable and profitable results. Game one is still to keep them loyal and happy, but game two is to at least replace the losses as well as grow your business. There are many ways described in this book to grow in a predictable, controlled, manageable manner. Keep of top of your precious, well serviced customer list - keep it accountable to you.

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