Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

Since you’re reading a marketing blog, I’m going to step out on a limb here and bet you know you can and should be getting more action from your marketing dollars. And if you’re like a lot of business owners I talk with, you’re avoiding it because you don’t know what to do first.

Lucky you. This article is going walk you through how we evaluate a new client’s business to know where to focus.

Where are you now?

Let’s pretend, for the sake of this article, that you’ve come to Clicks ‘n Conversions for help with improving your marketing program. The first thing I’ll do is to get a feel for what’s happening with your marketing now.

I’m less concerned initially with what you’re actually doing than I am with how well it’s working. How much traffic is coming to your website? How many leads are you generating on average? How well do your visitors respond to your website? How efficiently are you turning visitors into leads and leads into customers?

To do this, I need data from you. Much of that data is available from Google Analytics – or any other analytics application you have installed on your website. Don’t have analytics? Please get it. You can go here for instructions on how to install Google’s free analytics program.

Where do you need to be?

As I have a tendency to (maybe) overstate, marketing objectives should be derived directly from your sales objectives. So, in this hypothetical review of your current situation, I’m going to ask you about the following:

• Your revenue goals
• Your average customer value
• Your sales closing ratio

Good, fast or cheap?

Finally, I’m going to ask you what you’re willing to spend to get where you want to be. Because different approaches required different buy-ins we need to know what you have to work with. As the old saying goes: “You can have it good; you can have it fast; or you can have it cheap. Pick two.”

What’s the weakest link?

Now the magic begins. This is where we discover where you can get the most bang for your buck.

Your website.

Since I firmly believe a website is – or should be – the hub of all your marketing efforts, this is the first place I look. Specifically, I want to know what happens when visitors hit your website. Do they stay? If most of them bounce, I know we need to fix that first.
If enough of them stay I move on to something else.

Your inbound leads.

Next I look at the number of visitors coming to your website. Virtually anyone who buys from you will visit your website at least once before buying.  The number of unique visitors who come to your site and stay for more than a few seconds is a pretty good indicator of whether or not you have enough inbound action to start optimizing your processes to turn more visitors into leads and leads into customers.

If you’ve been running a marketing program but it hasn’t been a priority, chances are good you’re going to need to generate more inbound leads before we do much else. In that case, lead generation becomes the focus for the present.

Getting more from what you’ve got.

Sometimes new clients come to us thinking they want to work on lead generation when time and money would be better spent focusing on what happens after the initial contact.

You may be driving plenty of people to your website but only a small portion are taking your product tour or jumping on your free trial or asking to see a demo. In this case you’ll do yourself a favor by running tests to discover how you can get more visitors to take actions that move them closer to buying.

What to do next

Years ago I had a boss who constantly told us “The best thing is to do the right thing. The second best thing is to do the wrong thing. The worst thing is to do nothing.”

As a business owner myself I know that “doing nothing” is sometimes a useful strategy. But generally I’ve found that doing something is a better course to follow, and nowhere is this more true than in marketing. The marketplace continues to move around you. Buyers are buying – or getting ready to buy – and you’re not going to get your fair share (or more) by letting things meander along their own course.

I hope this article has given you a good ideas about where to look for the best place(s) to focus. If you need some help decided what to do, just ask a question here or send me an email at susan[at]clicksnconversions.com.