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Can you tell me exactly how much money you’re making from your various marketing campaigns?

• How many leads did you get from the tradeshow you just attended, even further how many became sales?
• How much money do you make from spending $5000/month on pay per click marketing?
• How many people visited your web site from the ad you placed in Time magazine?  Was it worth the $100,000 you spent?

You need to be able to track every penny you spend regardless of the size of your company.  We’ve got to identify what’s working and what’s not working.  Save some money and cut out whats not working and beef up the campaigns that are bringing in the most dollars for your company.  That follows the golden rules of why companies are in business: to make a profit.  To do so, you need to reduce expenses and or increase sales.

You should be thinking this sounds great, but how do I actually track my campaigns?  

First, you need to identify all the various campaigns you have taking place: online marketing, magazine ads, TV ads etc.  Each and every campaign needs to be tracked in a different way. 

The next step is to get google analytics installed on your web site – contact us if you need help in doing so - http://www.tazsol.com .  Once installed, you will gain a HUGE amount of data.   The basics of google analytics – it will tell you how many people are coming to your web site,  where they came from and what they are doing on your web site.   In another post we will go into more advanced Google Analytics options,  for now, simply get it on your web site!

The last step to tracking your campaigns to dollars is to customize and configure a customer relationship management tool.    We prefer and only use www.salesforce.com Its the most robust tool we have ever used.  If you are dealing with any phone orders or customer service issues you need to use a system like salesforce.com.  This tool will allow you to setup campaigns and then track them thru the entire sales process.  It also allows you to manage quality issues, technical issues and so on.   It will do just about anything you need: you need an English Muffin it will literally hand you an English Muffin (that’s an extreme dramatization, but you get the point)  If this sounds familiar we borrowed it from Geico

Let’s show you an example of how you can use a CRM tool to track your campaigns.  You sell sprinkler systems to schools and just got back from a tradeshow.  You’ve got 25 leads.    Your task is to follow up with those leads.  Our task – to determine how many of these leads became sales.

Using a tool like Salesforce.com, you would enter in the leads in the system noting the lead source – the specific trade show.  Once the lead became qualified (some will already be qualified) , you would change it into an opportunity.  An opportunity is qualified lead that has some sales potential. 

 If you end of quoting that person/company that information would get entered in Salesforce.com along with any other activity along the way: any phone calls that were made, emails exchanged etc.  The last step is closing out the opportunity – did you win it or did you lose it?  If you lost it we want to know why, if you won it great!

Re-read this section to see how we closed the loop.  You went from attending the trade show to coming back with 25 leads to quoting some of those and to winning some orders and not winning some.

If your orders/profits are greater than the cost of the show, you made a good decision.  If your orders does not cover the cost maybe you think about another show!

Keep reading our posts for further information on how to track leads to dollars – allowing you to make more informed and practical decisions!

Have a profitable Day!