Top 10 Small Business Marketing Mistakes - #1: Not Tracking Your Marketing

Top 10 Small Business Marketing Mistakes - #1: Not Tracking Your Marketing There are many reasons small businesses need to track the results of all their marketing. This helps them better understand which marketing is and is not working. It allows them to spend their budget on marketing effectively, but also to determine if they should continue to use the same methods or change their approach entirely. Regardless of your specific needs, there are great benefits to be had from tracking your marketing results, both at the macro level (for your entire business) and at the micro level (for individual marketing campaigns). This is important for both your online and offline marketing. Tracking the results of your marketing efforts can help you make important business decisions that will have lasting impact on your future success.

The Importance of Tracking Marketing Results It’s important for small businesses to track their marketing efforts so they can tell what is working and what isn’t. If a business is trying out multiple marketing channels, they need information that will help them decide where they want to devote their time and resources. Small businesses may even discover one marketing channel that unexpectedly works better for their business than another. Tracking is important because it gives you the ability to understand how your marketing dollars are spent and if they are effective.

For example, a business might experiment with a Pay per Click (PPC) advertising campaign but find that it does not produce any leads, thus rendering it ineffective for their needs. This gives the business owner the ability to either cancel the campaign all together or adjust it in order to target keywords that actually convert.

Another example is having a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that improves traffic substantially but does not convert website visitors into customers. For a business owner this can mean a few things.

They possibly are getting bad traffic and targeting the wrong audience or possibly the marketing company they are using is buying "fake" traffic to inflate the numbers (unfortunately this is common).

High traffic does not equal success. This also could simply mean that the website does not convert well and in need of some minor or major changes.

All of those "it could be this" or "it could be that" can be answered with tracking. Effective tracking leaves nothing to chance. If you are getting fake traffic it is easy to identify using Google Analytics. If your PPC ads are generating no leads - it is easy to evaluate and track the reasons behind that which could stem from an ineffective sales staff or a superstar sales staff converting the leads but they are being credited to another marketing source. Tracking is vital for your business and it is relatively easy to master it for your business.

Constantly Evaluate Your Marketing Efforts It is important that as the business owner you focus on marketing your business intelligently which includes not only choosing how to market your business but also constantly evaluating how well it performs. This means measuring what is and is not working and making changes when needed.

It is also important as a business owner you do not make rash choices after reviewing tracking results and immediately make significant changes to your marketing plan. This is a common mistake and it is vital that you are patient and give your marketing efforts a chance to succeed. Many marketing campaigns will produce little to no results initially but long term be quite effective because some efforts require nurturing and brand awareness.

However, through constant evaluation and documentation your marketing will be able to track the trends and after a while it will be clear if a campaign is deemed to fail. It also gives you the ability to find effective marketing campaigns and decide if you want to increase that budget. Constant evaluation of your marketing allows you to know what is and is not working for your business.

Tracking marketing results saves your business money and increase profits Tracking marketing results allows you to know what marketing efforts work and which do not work. As a business owner your primary reason for continuing a marketing campaign should be the profits generated for your business. There is no such thing as 100% tracking but at the end of your marketing campaign you should have a very good idea of what your return on investment was. The reason tracking saves your business money and increases your profits is because it allows you to stop the ineffective marketing and put more money into the marketing efforts that yield the highest return on investment. It is important that as business owners we do our due diligence and track results to ensure we make smart investments.

Here is a recent example: A highly reputable law firm that I was consulting for was investing a sizable amount into their Pay per Click advertising. Their business focuses primarily on family law so things like Divorce, Child Custody and Spousal Support etc. They hired an outside marketing company which is very common and usually effective to manage their website and also pay per click advertising.

After a 10 minute review of their Google AdWords reports including a quick keyword review I noticed that approximately 45% of their budget was being spent on keywords involving the word "free". After more detailed research a high percentage of the traffic was looking for free divorce papers and free divorce lawyers. After review of that traffic there was not a single known conversion and the average website visitor from those keywords spent less than 15 seconds on the website. A quick change (which should have been caught by their marketing company months ago) lowered their marketing spend by approximately 30% while increasing their lead conversion. After an exhaustive search and interview process I was able to find them a digital marketing firm that was a perfect fit for their needs. They have since increased their marketing budget and are seeing higher than ever conversions. SayWhat Consulting offers a free online marketing audit which reviews your entire online marketing efforts and as a member of our Business Owner Consulting Program we can find the perfect marketing firm for your business.

How do you measure results and consider them a success?

To measure whether or not something is a success, there are three basic questions that you have to ask yourself. What was your goal? Did you achieve it? How do you know it is working? This leads to the obvious that as the business owner you need to lay out in writing what you will deem a success and what you will consider a failure. This should be a part of your written marketing plan (which if you do not have then you are making a giant mistake) and have very clear and defined goals.

The first part of this is setting the actual goal. While doing this it is important that you are realistic saying that the goal is to increase revenue by 1000% without having evidence to support that as realistic is just foolish. And this happens often. Focus on having measurable and realistic goals and also identify the exact ways you are going to track those.

There are a few common mistakes businesses make when setting realistic goals for their marketing efforts.

1. They are not specific enough as to what will be considered a success. Business increasing by 15% is okay if you can prove that a specific marketing campaign is the reason for that growth.

2. Not having an idea as to how you will track your results and what metrics you will use to judge success or failure can lead to problems in your efforts going forward. Without tracking, you are forced to just guess at what is working and what is not, which can really hurt you over time as trends emerge from accurate data analysis instead of assuming things based on past performance.

3. Not giving themselves enough time to achieve their goal can lead to businesses giving up on marketing efforts much earlier than they should, even though they aren’t achieving success at a pace that matches their expectations.

4. Choosing to ignore their competition. Many small businesses feel like they will lay down the only pathway to success and others will follow. Be realistic and understand it is smart to look and review what your competition is doing because you can learn from their successes and failures.

Free Tracking tools are available and easily accessible.

There are many free tools available for tracking your marketing efforts. Most notably Google Analytics, but also Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. No matter what tool you choose it is important that you set up goals for your website and it is highly recommended to use all that are available. When it comes to marketing there is no such thing as too much information. This will allow you to track where your traffic is coming from, and which specific actions are causing people to visit your site.

Google analytics gives you vital information about the people interested in your company from demographics, to location down to even what type of device they are using to view your website from desktops to laptops, iPads to iPhones.

If you are too busy to constantly review all the tracking programs out there we would recommend focusing on Google Analytics only because it is focused solely on your website and what are the traffic sources to your website. Google analytics provides you with a wide array of information that will be helpful for all your marketing efforts, both online and offline.

Tracking gives you the ability to make better marketing choices When you choose to not track your marketing efforts it is easy to think that something that did not work was successful and vice versa. This can be a huge problem for your business both in the short and long term. When you are tracking, you know when something worked or didn’t work and can avoid spending more money and time on those avenues while investing in better opportunities. By tracking results and learning from them, you can see which strategies truly work and spend more money on them while saving money on what does not perform well.

Tracking is a vital part of business and your business's growth. Ignoring the sources of your income and the avenues which generated them can be detrimental to your business and at minimum cost your significant money long term in wasted marketing dollars.

Written by David Phillips, CEO and Founder of SayWhat Consulting. With over 20 years of experience, Mr. Phillips has consulted with small, medium and large businesses in marketing, business management,

staff training and day-to-day operations. SayWhat assists clients in numerous industries including cosmetic surgeons, plastic surgeons, med spas and attorneys in family law and criminal law. We also assist other industries as well and our primary clients are small and medium sized businesses.