You spend money, time and a lot of effort on your marketing, but you aren’t getting the results you want. Is it the ads that are underperforming, or it your sales team losing the sale?
Here are some tips you can use to help you decide.
As a business owner, you’re constantly busy, so when it comes to tracking your marketing ROI, we know it’s not something you relish. But it’s important. So what should you actually be tracking? Well, before we go there, the first thing you should do is define your goals. And when you do this, make sure your goals are SMART: S(Specific), M(Measurable), A(Achievable), R(Relevant), and T(Time Sensitive).
How are you tracking your marketing efforts?
Once you’ve established your goals, you can then clearly define the metrics you want to track. When it comes to your radio advertising, we suggest tracking your overall sales as well as any specific product or service sales that your message speaks to. You could also track referrals, foot traffic, lead quantity, and your conversion rate. Utilizing Google Analytics can be valuable for tracking your web efforts depending on where you are directing people in your radio ads. Social media shares, likes and retweets can also give you valuable insight into how your fans are interacting with your social content. As part of your content marketing, keep your eye on your pageviews, bounce rate and unique visitors on your website, as well as the open rates for your emails, SEO ranking, and document downloads.
Tracking this information will help you follow trends over time about how your customers are finding your business and how they respond to these efforts, allowing you to see if your marketing strategy is successful and if it is leading to a successful ROI. If your efforts are producing good numbers by the KPI’s you are tracking, but your ROI is not good, there could be a gap in your sales process once the leads you’ve received from marketing efforts reach your sales team.
How are those efforts converting?
Are you driving the majority of your marketing efforts to your sales team? If so, it’s smart to evaluate this process to see how the sales team’s efforts are converting.
If your marketing leads people to a sales staff, ensure they have all the necessary tools and knowledge to guide potential customers along the sales process. If you’re using a website, make sure that you have a landing page that’s designed to answer your customer’s questions and capture their information for future contact and conversation from a sales person.
When reviewing this side of the process, here are some things to consider:
- Have you shared your marketing campaign with your sales staff so they can be prepared and aware of the focus?
- Is your team trained?
- Do they have goals?
- Do they have the tools they need to influence decisions?
- Is your team responding quickly?
- Does your team only collect the information necessary to make a sale or do they make an effort to get to know the person they are selling to?
- Do they fully understand the opportunity and how to handle that?
- Does your team take control of the situation and the ‘next steps’ after an initial conversation?
- Is your team following up as necessary?
All of these factors listed above can have a major effect on the success of your sales team. If your team is not effective and efficient with these, this could be where the sale is getting lost and your marketing efforts are not converting to produce the ROI it could.
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After reviewing your efforts and process, you should have a better idea of what’s leading to the lack of marketing ROI. Use the information mentioned above to unveil areas that might be causing the lack. When reviewing your marketing efforts and analytics, if everything is performing well and the KPI’s are showing success on that part, then the sales process within your team is probably where the opportunity lies to revamp some efforts.
Make Changes
So how can you fix the problem to ensure your sales team is moving leads to sales and getting your business closer to its goals and producing a great ROI? You may consider changing your strategy. If it’s in fact your sales team, then you might have a little more work on your hands, but it’s not out of reach. Identify the issues and set a plan to improve the area which could produce better results. Set goals, host training exercises, and continue to re-evalute over time to ensure your sales team are converting the leads that your marketing sends you, and giving you the ROI you need and desire.
What’s Next?
Take full advantage of the help your media partner offers which can help you with analyzation and improvement in key areas of your marketing and sales. Here at Zimmer, our staff of experienced radio professionals is here to answer any questions or explain further any of these topics. We can help your business get the most bang for its buck when it comes to marketing ROI. Contact us if you’d like to setup an appointment.
