Market Your Way to the Top

There's nothing wrong with advertising -- we recommend it to our clients and we do it ourselves -- but you can't simply just advertise; you have to have a strategy that's wrapped around those three elements.

You need to measure your ROI. If you spend $1,000 on marketing, you need to get back at the very minimum $1,001. A lot of people come to me and say "I tried direct mail, I tried Yellow pages, I tried this and that and it didn't work." Well, they didn't really measure and they don't really know -- they don't test things. The ability to measure ROI is critical to the effectiveness of any marketing campaign.

The reason I wrote Your Marketing Sucks was because I felt like the way marketing has been done takes money from small-business owners and puts it in the garbage -- there's no strategy and they're not testing it to get a strategy that does work.

How do you do research to determine what kind of campaign is going to work? Let's say you do an advertising campaign. The best thing to do is make sure there's a prominent way for people who see or hear your ad to get in touch with the company. You need a phone number and a url. Sometimes you may want to create a special url so you can make sure you know where people are responding.

For example, go to YourMarketingSucks.com. There's a page where you can set up an appointment by phone. We set that up for a particular campaign we're having as a way to know where people are coming from. They do it, we measure it and see how many people made appointments. But that's not good enough, either -- you need to determine how many appointments were converted into clients. That particular campaign cost about $10,000. So the only way it is successful is if we get back at least $10,001 in revenue.

So what if you don't; Do you scrap that campaign? You might want to change the message to another message, and if it doesn't work, then you can also try another medium. But in that campaign, for example, in the first week it was a radio ad, which cost $10,800.