Taking,the,Mystery,out,Marketi marketing Taking the Mystery out of Marketing
Automation technologies represent a fundamental aspect of any modern industry. The major types of industrial automation solutions, such as DCS, PLC, SCADA, and MES, are used on a large-scale in process and discrete industries.DCS technologie Awhile ago, I got an email from one of the "gurus" I follow and it shocked me. The gist of it was this person wanted to trade services for a household item.To say it floored me would be an understatement.What was worse was a few days later t
Knowing where to start to improve your marketing can be a bit ofa mystery. Is it your marketing message, the places youadvertise, your web site or what? By measuring the results oryour marketing efforts and collecting feedback, you can uncoverthe secrets of what is and isn't working and learn what torefurbish or replace to generate more leads and increase sales.Tom called me with a question about how to increase sales fromhis web site. Despite having spent three thousand dollars tobuild an attractive web, he wasn't generating leads from hissite. Only a small handful of people had contacted him since thesite went live two months ago.Do you have a web site? Are you disappointed by the number ofleads and sales your site is generating?I asked Tom what percentage of daily or weekly visitors to hissite contacted him. He didn't know the answer. I asked him howmany people visited his site per month. He didn't know. I askedhim, how many sales of his books and coaching services had beengenerated by his web site. He didn't have that information,either.If you want to improve the performance of any marketing effort,whether online or offline, make the effort to collect andevaluate the results. You can use easily available numbers tohelp you fix what's not working and improve what is.Ever go on a diet? How do you tell if your eating and exerciseregimens are working? You step on the scale and look at thenumber of pounds you've lost or gained. This simple figure givesyou the truth about the success of your dieting efforts. Toimprove sales, track response to each of your marketing effortsand conversion rates.1. Response RatesIf you spend money on advertising to drive people to yourbusiness web site, you want to know how many people responded toyour ad and visited your site. If you're only getting a handfulof responses, the problem could be your ad. Something as simpleas changing the marketing message you use in your advertising orin your search engine listings could increase your responserate.If you've had success with the ad in another publication, it maybe that the particular ezine or web site isn't reaching yourtarget audience and you'd be better off spending youradvertising dollars elsewhere. If you track your ad results youcan quickly discover where to avoid spending on advertising thatdoesn't work and make changes to get more out of eachadvertising dollar.2. Conversion RatesIf your web site draws lots of visitors, you'll want to knowwhat percentage of those visitors are buying, and if not buying,at least signing up for your ezine. With these conversion ratesyou can determine how to increase your online sales.Barbara has a subscription-based web site that pulls in overtwelve hundred visitors a day, yet only seven people a daycontact her and the site only generates sales a couple of timesa week. Is this the best she can do? Probably not.You can prompt 10-50% of the people who visit your web site tocontact you and then work on converting these qualified leads tosales. For Barbara, all it took was a few changes in her layoutand copy for her to add two to three hundred people a day to herlist of qualified leads and increase sales to dozens each day.One of the most important things to identify and measure iswhere sales come from. If you advertise with Google or in ezinesand see that an ad has more than paid for itself in leadsgenerated and sales, you'll know its worth running again.Just asking people where they heard of you or how they arrivedat your web site is useful. When I asked one client how theyfound my site, they explained how they had been searching theweb using the phrase, "marketing services" and how difficult ithad been to find the site.My advertising hadn't targeted the phrase "marketing services",so I quickly added it to the list of keywords for my ads. Theresult? The next day someone came to my site via my targeted adand bought every marketing manual I sell.Don't let marketing be a mystery. Start analyzing what is andisn't working so you know what to fix. If your marketing isworking, use these same numbers to set new goals for leadgeneration and salës conversions and be even more successful.
Taking,the,Mystery,out,Marketi