Updated June 1, 2022.
You are at a trade show…
Which cost you $3,000, but hey, it’s what you’ve been doing every year for the past seven years and it seems to have generated some pretty good results. You show off your business, and people learn more about you.
You pass out fliers, candy, pens, and even host a raffle to increase engagement with your stall.
Then, Monday comes and you sit at your phone, ready for the calls to come in.
But the books need to be balanced, the new guy needs help getting the next job started, and you need to make a personal delivery to one of your best clients.
- A day passes
- Two days
- A week
- Then a month
Three months later you are pouring over your books and you notice that $3000 expense for “advertising.” A simple question forms in your mind:
Was this worth it?
You don’t know, because you weren’t measuring your Marketing Performance.
How this could have been different
A common tactic for businesses to measure marketing performance before the web was to use printed coupons. The business would pass out the coupons at the event and require the attendees to bring the coupon in order to redeem it.
This way, the business would know that the event marketing generated some results.
In a similar fashion, you can have “gifts” or a “drawing,” and in order for people to win they need to visit a specific page on your website, such as “drawing.yourbusiness.com” and leave some basic contact information. This form will enter them into your email marketing platform.
With this, you have a clear, concise method of measuring your success. This is step one in measuring Marketing Performance.
After the event, you take a look at your marketing platform, over the course of the weekend you got 107 new contacts.
You pick a winner and send them their free chainsaw ( or whatever you chose to give away ).
Now, what is this worth?
If you know your target market well enough, you would know what types of “toys” they would be interested in, we’ll just assume your target market likes chainsaws.
So, you gave away a $175.00 chainsaw and paid $3,000 for the event and the booth equipment, totaling $3,175. Doing some simple math we can work out the cost of each contact:
$3,175 / 107 = $29.67
Not bad, considering the average cost of a lead is $47. learn more
Of course, the leads mean nothing if you don’t take action. Using your email marketing platform you send out emails once a week, offering good, valuable information and occasionally asking if there is anything you can do to assist them.
You do this, and out of the 107, 11 turn into paying customers who pay you on average about $400 each for your services, resulting in $4,400 in sales.
This is of course sales, not income, and you probably still lost money once you consider the costs of performing those services, but how many of these 11 give you referrals?
If you’re good enough at what you do, that rabbit hole will just keep going deeper, and there are referrals of referrals of referrals.
So, what changed?
Fundamentally, we had 3 things going on:
- A well-defined means of success
- A plan to accomplish that state of success
- A way to monetize/benefit from that success
Let’s break it out:
A well-defined means of success
We want people to get people signed up for our email marketing platform. We can easily measure this by looking at how many subscribers registered over the course of the weekend.
A plan to accomplish that state of success
The vehicle in this case is the trade show. You have an opportunity to expose yourself to many people in your market, and you offer the chance of getting a chainsaw in exchange for some basic contact information.
A way to monetize/benefit from that success
Once you’ve got everyone into your online marketing, you can send regular “how ya doing” emails and valuable content to keep them engaged with your business. This results in a way to generate business actively with minimal effort.
In Conclusion
Marketing performance is one of those things that when understood, developed, and focused on takes a lot of the “wizardly” out of keeping your business afloat.
Of course, it’s very important to do what you’re business does, but knowing what methods work to get that business can save a lot of stress, time, and money.
Websites, which are foundationally very technical measurement tools, can help you measure your marketing performance so you can double down on what’s working.
If you have any questions about how to best fit this into your own business, feel free to get in contact to schedule a free consultation.