I recently received the
following question, “What are the steps to improve my marketing return on
investment?”
Like most general marketing
questions like this, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. The steps for your
business may not be the same for my business and vice versa. It all depends on
your current situation.
So the bad news here is that I
can’t give you a definitive, specific answer to your situation (without knowing
more about the details of your business).
The
good news is that I’m going to walk you through a tried-and-true process that
should reveal the answer to you. That is, of course, if you actually follow the
3 steps below.
Step 1. Identify What’s
Working
Where are your sales coming
from right now? Is search advertising working? How about search engine
optimization (SEO)? Social media? Email marketing?
If you’re scratching your head,
don’t worry, you’re not alone! Most businesses I talk to struggle to identify
which marketing channels are profitably driving leads and sales.
To be clear, I’m not talking
about website traffic. Just because you’re getting thousands of visitors from a
marketing channel doesn’t mean it’s working. I’m talking about conversions
(leads and sales). And the only way to talk about conversions is to have
conversion tracking installed on your site.
That’s step one. Install
conversion tracking and then review the data to identify what’s working. Sounds
simple enough, right?
Step 2. Identify Your
Bottleneck
In step 1 you determined which
marketing channels are driving leads and sales. Now it’s time to dig a little
deeper to see how we can improve what’s already working.
The question we’re looking to
answer is, where is your
sales funnel breaking down? In other words, where’s the bottleneck?
What’s preventing those marketing channels from generating even more
leads and sales?
The analogy here is a hose. If
you’ve ever played with a hose, then you know that you can slow down, and even
stop, the flow of water by making a kink in the hose. I remember as a kid I
used to make a kink in the hose, get close to an unwitting friend and then
release the kink to shoot the water out like a fire hose. :)
The kink in my example is the
bottleneck. And our job is to find these kinks and release them so the sales
can shoot into your business.
In order to find the kinks, you
need to document your entire sales funnel. By that I mean write down every single
step in the sales process from when a person lands on your website to when they
become a paying customer. Once you have your sales funnel mapped out, then dig
into your analytics to see the conversion rates from each step to the next.
I guarantee if you go through
this process you’ll find steps where a high percentage of prospects are getting
clogged up and not converting to customers.
Step 3. Write Down the Specific Next Steps
Let’s imagine you run an
e-commerce website. Let’s say you’ve been following along here and you
identified SEO is working and your final checkout page as a major bottleneck.
Lots of prospective customers are adding products to their cart, clicking
through to the checkout page, but not completing their order.
Now what?
Well, the natural instinct here
is to write down a task like “fix checkout page” or “improve checkout
conversions.” Don’t worry if you already wrote that down… I struggle with this
as well.
The problem is that those two
tasks are not the very next steps to make an improvement. The very next step is
to either brainstorm with your team or a consultant to get ideas to test. Then
you’ll need to get your web developer to create the new checkout page. And
finally, you’ll need to create a split test experiment to see if your new page
statistically improves the conversion rates of your current page.
See the difference?
On the surface, it may not seem
like much, but if you write down the specific next steps rather than the
overarching goal, then you’ll be more likely to cross it off your “To Do” list
— and improve your ROI.
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