Think you want to be in the Internet marketing space? The most important thing to remember is to think of it as a "Just Do It" campaign. You want to get ready and just do it. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time, but what we like to say is "Just do it, NOW!"
The reason why we say "NOW" is because we encourage people to always be testing, trying new methods of marketing, trying new ways to connect with customers, and getting to where new customers are, as well existing customers. You want acting in a way where you can evaluate if what you are doing is effective. In your small/mid size business, you have a finite amount of time to be dedicating to your marketing sales efforts in comparison to executing your business. Every minute counts, every hour counts; time is money. So, you want to make sure that the primary marketing tactics you're using are getting you to where you need to be and you're not wasting time, essentially money.
In order to properly understand whether or not something is working for you, you need objectives. In Internet marketing, there are key performance indicators to help you judge whether or not your campaigns are working, regardless of what tactics are executed.
First, you have to worry about your total audience size. The size of the audience that you reach with your campaigns and tactics does make a huge difference. Obviously, the more people you contact, the larger the likelihood that a good percentage of those people will react just naturally. As a result, the more people you talk to, the more people will react - it's just simple math. However, contacting large numbers of people isn't always cost-effective.
Second, you have to worry about targeting, within that large audience, specific people who are going to have a higher likelihood of responding to you. Every dollar spent on a large audience where someone was never going to respond to your messages is a dollar wasted. Profiling is filing the actual key audiences that are most like your current customers, people who are actually spending money. You want to evaluate what makes that customer a customer. This can be done through surveying your customer base, asking them questions, personally, when they're in your store or your establishment, following up with extra questions, or sending a quick survey after they received their order confirmation. Find out why they chose you and begin to look at the demographics of those people. Are your people primarily local? Do they have similar, economic, ethnic, or location-based background where you can focus on a target in a broader sense to narrow down the effectiveness of your campaigns?
Third, you want to measure the conversion of your marketing messages. That can be through requesting more information, asking for a free consultation, or downloading a report. You want to get them to take a small, yet critical step in trading them some value, some kind of incentive in order for them to give you their contact information and tell you more about themselves. Maybe they'll answer a 3-question survey tops giving you their e-mail address, name and phone number and measure the conversion of those people from a targeted list to signing up for more information and responding to your initial, incentive offer.
Fourth, you want to measure 2 things in terms of sales. You want to understand how long someone is typically on your marketing list before they make a purchase and how many people on your marketing list end up making a purchase. Those are the 2 important factors. The first one (how long they're on your list) will tell you how you can better project sales and revenue. Obviously, when they are converted to sale, that's just a number that we get on our mailing list from a good profile is a successful way for us to close a sale. Then, we can look at ways to scale that up to increase the number of people and convert to a sale. Additionally, if you find that you have a lot of repeat customers, you may want to begin looking at the trance and the patterns of buying and how often they re-buy from you. Are they buying the same product over and over? This completely depends on your business, what you're selling and what kind of service you offer. Some services by nature are recurring and people continue to pay for them and some goes off no matter what. So, you want to keep in mind what the recurring pattern is so you can continue to contact people and encourage them.
What are you waiting for? DO IT NOW!