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In today’s competitive world, you must constantly improve your strategies and tactics to be more successful and profitable. Even the best programs lose their usefulness eventually.& Billionaire Bill Gates said it best: “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking that they cannot lose.” Industry giants such as McDonald’s, Mercedes Benz and AOL have all stumbled in recent years.
What can you do to increase the number of customers you serve, your revenues and your profits? How can you get a higher return on the investments you are making in your business? The answer is to learn how to use marketing leverage – doing ever more with ever less. Increasing profits, revenues and customers are results, not actions. To achieve those results, you must concentrate on what actions you will take to achieve those results.
Marketing is critical to the success of your business. Marketing is not an expense. It is an investment. And, as with any investment, you should expect a positive return. If the marketing strategy is working, invest more to get more. If it isn’t, then stop or change it until it is working.
So, as a business owner, how can you manage for massive returns? Test and measure everything you do. In business, you need to spend just as much time working on getting your products and services "off of the shelf" as you do putting them on. It is only when you “clean the shelves” or sell something, that you generate revenue. So, it only stands to reason that you should spend as much time measuring the effectiveness of your marketing programs as you do measuring the effectiveness of your production.
Remember, you don't always need to out strategize your competition. Rather, spend your time on implementing, tracking the results and making adjustments. Successful investor Warren Buffet said, “You don’t need to have extraordinary efforts to achieve extraordinary results. You just need to do the ordinary, everyday things exceptionally well.”
Measure the effectiveness of both the money and the time you invest in advertising, networking, public relations, referral strategies, direct mail and other marketing activities. It is a necessary first step toward evaluating the effectiveness of your programs going forward. You will also find that simply by tracking your results, the return on your marketing investments will improve.
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