Be Light, Get Results Right
When it comes to marketing, companies need to be light on their feet. They need to develop and execute great campaigns, sure. But before starting a campaign, they also need to make sure they’re able to track that campaign’s results.
When you can track how many leads are coming in from which campaigns (and maybe more importantly, which campaigns aren’t producing results), your business will both streamline and fully capitalize on its marketing.
Tracking
Tracking a campaign means you have to know how and where you get new leads, so it’s important to build a system that does this (and train your employees to do the same).
Tracking leads can be tricky. Customers don’t always remember where exactly they heard your name. But don’t get bogged down trying for 100% accuracy. What you want at this stage is a simple, reliable tracking system that can show trends over time (both in the short and long term).
The longer you keep a marketing analytics system in place, the more data you’ll collect. And with more data, comes even better accuracy and forecasting abilities. You’ll be able to see not only that a customer purchased something one time: you’ll be able to track the entire customer lifecycle.
The value that kind of data can have on your business (and bottom line) is significant. When your team understands the value a customer can have on your company over their entire consumer lifecycle, you can get away from a one-purchase, transactional kind of relationship, and instead build something even better.
Think of the story of the two Cadillac dealers. One saw a single customer as solely the profit from selling one car – about $3,000 at the time. That dealer treated customers according to that assumed value. But on the other side of town was another dealer, who saw that good customers could buy four or five cars over their lifetime, not to mention refer their friends and family to buy their own. In actuality, one customer could bring $15,000 of profit to the dealership over the course of their lifetime. Guess how the second dealer’s customers got treated?
Understanding the value of a customer is one of the hallmarks of marketing. And analytics will only help solidify that.
