Many Business Owners select a Marketing tactic and jump straight into execution. Very often there’s no strategy behind the tactic. Then, it doesn’t work, results are poor and they dump it, blame the tactic (e.g. flyers, telemarketing, facebook ads, direct mail) and say it doesn’t work for them.

Sound familiar?

Here are 5 things you must do to get Better Marketing Results.

The 5 Marketing Fundamentals

1. Have a Marketing Budget

Marketing is an on-going process. Have a pre-set Marketing Budget, just like you budget for salary before hiring or budget for machinery and equipment before adding a production line.

Many people just do ad-hoc marketing and decide to spend maybe RM 5,000 on a flyer or Google ads. Marketing has to be consistent to be effective. So start by setting a budget and allocating how you will invest it.

2 Monitor and Control

One you’ve set your budget, you need to monitor the results and control your spending. What are you monitoring? Here are a few important ones :-

i) How many responses or enquiries did your marketing piece / activity generate?

ii) How many of these enquiries turned into actual sales?

iii) How much was the average invoice?

iv) Did the increase in sales more than cover the spending to generate the sales?

v) What did it cost per new customer?

vi) What did it cost per new enquiry?

vii) If the marketing piece was a promotion targeted at existing customers, did they
buy more?

Knowing these critical numbers will help you make better decisions for your next Marketing activity and help you fine tune your current one.

3. Test, Test, Test

It’s a shocking statistics, but 80% of Marketing doesn’t work. If all marketing worked, life would be easy, isn’t it?

So, it’s imperative that we test every bit of our Marketing. That’s what big successful companies like Coca-Cola, Apple and Nike do. For example, they test their headline, their offer, the colour used, the medium used even the day of week.

Testing helps refine and hone down what works best with our target market – which brings us to the next fundamental.

4. Understand Your Target

Take the time to really understand your target. Who’s your primary target?

Your target could be women, for example. But exactly what sort of women? Young, old? Are they career women or home-makers? Are they middle income or higher income? What sort of hand-bag do they carry? Where would they go shopping? How often? Do they cook or mainly eat out?

Starting to get the idea?

All these things have an impact on the Marketing that we develop and ultimately on the results of our Marketing efforts.

5. Set clear objectives for each campaign

When I was an Advertising man many years ago, I’d wonder why clients always want to achieve so many things with one campaign. Yet the most effective marketing is usually single-minded. We might have 5 objectives, but to get the best results, each Marketing activity should focus on one over-riding objective – e.g. to generate trial or to generate enquiries or to increase bulk purchase, etc.

So there you have it. Five fundamentals that will help you get better Marketing results.

Get started with one and move on to the next. Keep at it until it becomes systematic and automatic and see your results soar.

All the best.