What To Do With Your Results

The first thing to do is see what’s not working. If an ad is getting a very low response (which means the profit margin from the sales is not at least paying for the ad), kill it.

Of course, you need to consider the lifetime value of your customer as well. If, after taking all factors into account and you’re not getting results, bite the bullet and stop running the ad. Every time you run this sort of ad, you’re literally giving away money. Now you have two options… channel your marketing funds elsewhere (like back into your pocket) or improve the ad.

If you choose option two, there are a couple of things you can do to make the task simpler. First, go back over your past ads and think about how well each one worked. Pull out the best two or three and see if you can pick out what gave them their edge. Next, read a couple of books on marketing, or at least browse through them. Finally, look at what your competitors are doing. Do they have an ad which they run every week? Unless they’re stupid, this ad must be doing ok. So what’s different about it when compared to yours? What ideas can you steal from it?

After all of this, write a new ad. Don’t do anything with it yet – we’ll get to that in a minute.

Go through this process with each marketing piece that doesn’t seem to be working (letters, Yellow Pages, referral systems, flyers and so on).

Kill, examine, modify. Kill, examine, modify.

Once you have a collection of these revised pieces, just hold onto them. There’s something more important you need to deal with first… the strategies that are working. Run through each of the working strategies in depth. Examine why they’re producing results and the others aren’t. See if you can pick out the one important attractive point about each. This in itself will teach you a massive amount about your business.

Next, think of a way to do each strategy on a larger scale. If it’s flyers, the answer is simple… drop twice as many flyers. That should bring twice the sales. If it’s an ad, run it in more papers, or increase its size. If it’s Yellow Pages, book a bigger space next time.

But whatever you do, don’t meddle. Just do the same thing on a larger scale. After that, test and measure for another 2 weeks. Notice if the number of enquiries remains the same or goes down. Also compare this with how much you’re spending on marketing.

You’ll probably find that you barely miss those dud strategies and the ‘larger scale’ working strategies are paying off nicely. If it’s not, return to the original size.

Conversion is the number of enquiries that become sales. You may find you get one in ten, 99 out of a hundred or anything in between.

Leave it for a month or so… just work on converting the supply of leads you have. A better conversion technique, plus more leads from a bigger scale of your successful marketing strategies should give your business a boost. The lack of dead money being poured into ads that don’t work should also give you a helping hand.

After running through this process, it’s time to pull your revised ‘dud’ strategies’ out of the drawer, and give them a run. Do one at a time, and track the results meticulously. Note exactly how many leads it brings you and how many of those turn into actual sales. Compare that with the marketing cost, and judge whether it’s been a good strategy.

If so, add it to your list of ongoing strategies. If not, don’t give up hope. Try it again… testing a different headline, medium, offer, look, etc. Change a meaningful part of it and measure the results.

If it doesn’t work again, give it one more try. If you get the feeling NOTHING is going to work, abandon the idea (it’s probably the wrong approach altogether) and concentrate your efforts somewhere else.

Very soon, you’ll develop a collection of marketing strategies that work, and weed out all the costly ones.

Now that’s a business success formula, and the real benefit of testing and measuring.