Page 284 - Duct Tape Marketing

Commit to Your Marketing with a Plan, Budget, and Calendar

Create Your Marketing Tracking Gauge

In order to meet your marketing goals, you must aggressively track
your marketing progress. I’m not suggesting you become a slave to
the numbers—no one really has the time or the need for that—but
I do think you should create a wall-sized poster that keeps your criti-
cal marketing goals out front for all to see. Your marketing chart, the
process that allows you a daily visual of what’s important, what’s on
track, and what’s off track, wields a powerful force of focus on your
marketing goals.

The Ultimate Measure of Sticky Marketing
In the end, the ultimate measure of the effectiveness of your mar-

keting comes down to creating and keeping clients. I like to create
measurements that keep an eye on this ultimate measure.

While tracking your success keeps you focused and validates
your progress, it is also a tool that can help you identify problem
areas in your system. If, for instance, you are generating lots of leads,
but too few of those leads choose to become clients, you may have
a problem with your lead conversion process. On the other hand, if
you close most of your appointments but can’t get in front of enough
prospects, you may need to adjust your advertising or lead generation
strategies.

There are three simple reports that most businesses can create as
simple spreadsheets and use to track marketing success or, as I call
it, stickiness: prospect-to-customer ratio, lead generation reports, and
lead conversion reports.

Prospect-to-customer ratio. The number of new customers you
acquire for your business divided by the number of prospects gen-
erated by your lead generation system is your prospect-to-customer
ratio. For example, if you generate 5 new customers in a month and
47 people entered your lead generation system by downloading your

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