I'm often asked "Laura, what is the biggest mistake companies make when it comes to marketing?" The answer is easy.
The biggest mistake, I see is when a company doesn't track their marketing efforts. They simply spend their marketing budget and then they cross their fingers. There was a time that it was difficult to track marketing efforts, especially commercials and print advertisements. That's not the case any longer, so there is really no excuse to not tracking your marketing efforts.
Tracking and monitoring your marketing efforts and advertisements will help you in allocating your marketing budget in marketing campaigns that you know will work. There is nothing more devastating to a company than to spend money on an advertisement that produces little or no results.
You can track your offline marketing efforts, so that you have the knowledge that you need when it comes to knowing what worked and what didn't. The result of tracking is an accurate measurement of what marketing efforts were effective and no longer depending on inaccurate guesswork to determine where you spend your marketing budget. Let me share with you a few tracking methods that I use when marketing offline.
Your Turn: How do you track your offline marketing? Do you use a different method that I have not mentioned? I'd like to know.
Yes…tracking is key to understanding how your marketing is working. Phone tracking is easy to track by having the prospect ask for a specific person (can even be fictitious name).
When it comes to Sales and Marketing to many businesses treat them as separate entities. I like to call the the twin siblings that communicate the same, consistent message. They should be the facilitators to assist the consumer in the buying process.
Too much marketing is still based on the old “brand builder” concept…full of platitudes and information that barely distinguishes one company from any of their competitors. A good example is to look at Lawyers. All their marketing could be interchangeable.
I hate the term “salesperson”! I prefer to call them
“buy-ologists”. They shouldn’t be trying to “sell” anything.
Tracking offline marketing is easier than you think. You can buy URLs and create 301-redirects to bit.ly links. This way you have an easy-to-remember URL that is totally trackable. This video explains how to do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4-S9-qsvCo&feature=channel_video_title