We have become a world that makes decision because of what we are told as opposed to what really works. Television, Movies, Media of all types portray a world we strive to live in but is, in fact, an alternative reality! Who else is glad the damn elections are over. How can anyone even watch them?
Small business owners have one significant advantage over large corporations. They can react more quickly!! This is the most over looked opportunity that exists in the world of small business. However, that advantage is completely obliterated if you don’t take the time to gather information upon which to react.
There are so many inexpensive tools available to small business and the nice thing is that the amount of data being so small makes it much easier to track, and analyze.
Google Analytics is a FREE software that is so easy to put on your web site and virtually tells you the underwear color of each visitor. It is possible to track information that tells you which advertising/marketing campaign delivered the contact.
It is also possible to route people who come from offline sources through the online tracking back to Google Analytics! You can do this with Phone Calls via Keyword Call Tracking and Direct Mail… Even TV and Radio to some extent.
If you follow each contact throughout their visit to your site and track each conversion back to the user and the campaign, voila, you know where it came from. Then it is simple to calculate the return.
The problem is that the “Agency” method of doing business is gone. It was packed with fluff the same way wall-street was and really still is. Agencies don’t want you to track their results. Advertisers don’t want you to track their results. They all want you to believe in the power of the brand. The intangibles, the creative…
It’s not that those things are unimportant, it’s just that they are not as important as they are made out to be. No wonder though, they are being sold to you by people who’s job it is to create an alternate reality.
The truth is many business owners don’t want to track because they are afraid to know the truth. If it is not working then they are a failure. They were “taken advantage” of. They need to admit weakness.
GET OVER IT!
An imperical case study comes from a real life example of an auto dealership in Reading Pennsylvania, where our home offices are. He ran a single commercial on a single channel on a single night for a single car! Every person who came in or called for that car saw it in one place. Unquestionably. The medium for the campaign was a cable TV commercial for professional wrestling match!
Each person who came in was greeted with some reference to the matches and acknowledgment that they were a wrestling fan. 40% of them denied watching wrestling! This is the reality folks. People lie! Wrestling is a guilty pleasure people don’t like to associate with. They do it in the privacy of their home and don’t like to be called out on it, so they give you bad data. Garbage in, garbage out.
So next time someone asks you if you track your sales and you say “yes, we ask every customer how they heard about us” ask them if they watch wrestling!
Copyright ©2010 Sales Logik, LLC