Does your business track the source of incoming leads and new accounts? Do you know which promotions, strategies, and marketing tools are generating the biggest results?
If you don’t, you’re selling your company short.
Without the right information, you can never be sure which of your marketing investments is most successful – and by extension, which future activities are going to be worth the effort and investment. What’s more, you can’t really know how well you are progressing against your bottom-line targets, at least beyond a simple estimate of whether you’re going to hit your revenue goal or not.
The key to bringing all of these together is tracking the sources of inbound leads and new accounts. You absolutely have to know where your business is coming from if you want to get more of it in the future. But how do you find that information? There are a number of tools you can use, ranging from simple to sophisticated:
Customer conversations and questionnaires. Obviously, you could just ask buyers how they heard. That’s sometimes the simplest, cheapest, and most effective way, although you’ll be surprised at how many customers simply don’t remember, even if you ask them immediately.
Coupon codes and offer numbers. Coupons and discount codes go back generations, when the first advertisers used them to test different promotions and messages. You can do the same, using different ideas for separate marketing campaigns to track the results and measure them against one another.
Landing page and cookie combinations. By sending different types of customers to different pages (and studying their behavior online afterwards), you can get a fairly clear picture of where customers are coming from, and what they want to do. But, deciphering the numbers can be difficult, and you need lots of visitors to identify clear trends.
Advanced metrics packages. If most of your business comes from the web, then you might want to invest in an advanced metrics package. These platforms can give you all kinds of interesting data that you can’t get elsewhere, but require a bit of training and patience to master.
If you’re new to inbound lead tracking, it might be a good idea to start with simpler methods and move up from there. When it comes down to it, any information about the source of new business is better than none at all… and the better your information is, the faster your company can grow.
Want to start building smarter, more efficient online and offline marketing plans? Call the Brew City team and ask for a free consultation today!
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