Numbers.
Most tend to either love them or hate them. But numbers tell a story when you’re looking at your own company, and it’s a worthwhile story to examine.
At Juice, we do a marketing wheel with people to see if their overall approach to marketing is balanced. One of the spokes of the wheel is tracking. It’s a necessary step to take, because it tells the story of effectiveness.
You should be tracking the source of all your business. Where did your business come from? Your networking, Sally Jo’s networking, the April postcard campaign you did, was it a referral from a friend … you get the idea.
Attributing Business
Attribute each client to the person or marketing that first brought them to you. Over time, that will demonstrate that person or marketing’s effectiveness.
For instance, Teresa Caiazza-Conte from McFarland Gould Lyons Sullivan & Hogan, P.A. referred Smooth Gator to Juice years ago. He’s been our client since then, and every time we do another project for him, I attribute Teresa and that networking group we were in together for that business.
Tracking Business
Tracking shows you what’s working and what’s not. You may be spending hours with one type of networking, but in reality, its results aren’t benefitting your company. This clearly illuminates those situations and makes you examine how to best spend your time and resources. We all want to maximize our time the best way possible. We all want to maximize our marketing dollars too. Examining the results of how we invest our time and marketing spend is key to knowing the next steps to take.
Next, track new business as compared to repeat business. You want to determine the percentage split between the new clients you are bringing into your company and the return customers that are coming back to you. We all have an idea as to what those numbers are, but until you crunch the numbers, you may be surprised what the reality shows. Is it a healthy balance for your type of business? To get that healthy balance, what changes do you need to employ?
At Juice, we take these steps even further by evaluating them for each of us so that every team member knows how they’re doing. This helps us know where to focus our energies individually too.
Numbers get you thinking. They make you evaluate what you’ve done so you can make the right adjustments to your course. Without adjusting your sails, you may never catch the wind.