Marketing is sometimes a tough gig to prove its value. The customer journey is so convoluted today that it is almost impossible to 100% accurately attribute what is working and what isn’t. That being said, I recently saved a customer $19800 for the upcoming 2019 year by doing these two simple things.
Tracking & Analyzing data. BORING… but when done right, VERY effective.
The biggest problem is, who has the time or the expertise to do it effectively. Psst… I do! But seriously, it is boring but, can it ever save you time AND money.
The above example I’ve referenced was in regards to $20k of the $32k they spend ever year with a specific marketing services vendor. Now 12k of their spend was actually money fairly well spent. If it was my business, I probably would’ve changed it up a bit, but all-in-all, it certainly wasn’t a complete waste of money.
First and foremost, all of the groundwork for being able to do proper analysis was done a couple years ago when we inserted detailed analytics into their website. The more historical data you have, the better you are able to determine what is working and what isn’t, identify emerging trends, etc.
As a side note, if you don’t have detailed data BEYOND what your website provider gives you, you need to change that TODAY (it’s very simple and I can assist you with that – at no cost).
Now is probably a good time to stop and mention that the pitch this vendor had in regards to retaining my customer’s business in 2019 was tremendous. It all made sense and was fairly convincing. Of course, that was all based on THEIR analysis in relation to THEIR business; NOT how the data was intertwined within the dealership. Of course, the vendor doesn’t have your data so they build their talking points around their data. A very narrow and distorted view of your business (another place where my expertise comes into play – knowing what questions to ask).
Secondly, with all of the available, detailed data assembled for analysis, I was able to determine just how effective that $20k/year was as it related to the customer’s business from the customer’s viewpoint.
Below is a small snippet of the data analysis done for my client. The spend in question is noted as #5 in the chart.
Outside of traffic coming from search engines (Google, Bing, etc.), #5 provided the lowest engaging traffic by far. Engagement is one of the key elements in determining if a marketing effort is being effective or not – not the sole element, but in this case, it is one of the top 1 or 2 components to look at. Traffic from this source made up 0.72% of their total traffic (which isn’t necessarily a bad number believe it or not) BUT having that traffic only account for 0.06% of the total time spent on their website is atrocious… especially for 20k and considering this vendor’s story was wrapped around the value of visitor they brought to my customer’s website.
Advocacy: Vouching for your business
This is exactly why I started Smarter Business Solutions. Way too often, honestly like 98% of all conversations that I sat in on between rep and dealer while working with Trader, the dealer didn’t have any sort of data to show to prove to him/herself that the product/service they were investing in, or preparing to buy, would have/was having a positive impact on their business. This always led to status quo, followed by complaints of paying too much – yet they continued on doing so simply because they couldn’t make a determination that changing wouldn’t hurt their business.
The Advocacy that I do for my customers is two-fold. The first component involves collecting and analyzing data for each vendor and trying to do a as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as possible in conjunction with business data and goals. The second component is to off-load the endless schedule of tedious conversations and pitches with current or prospective marketing vendors and identifying where there is value to be had with products/services that could be part of the overall scope of their marketing initiatives.
Feel free to let me know if this is something that you need to offload in order to create proper conversations around getting as much value of your marketing efforts as possible.