Determining Your Marketing Methods

30 Knowing The Three Ways To Grow A Business

To grow any business you will need to either attract new customers or increase transaction value and frequency of purchase of the customers you have already got. Or even better you can do all three.

If you were the owner of a baker’s shop one way to sell more would be to attract more customers. You could do this by offering a free loaf to every new customer. Another way would be to sell more to the customers you have got. You could offer a special meal deal that consists of a baguette, a cake, a packet of crisps and a drink at a special package price. A third way would be to encourage the customers you have got to come in and shop more frequently. You could do that by creating a loyalty card and giving discounts for frequent visits.

Why Is This Information Important?

Many people focus on getting new customers as if this was the only way to build business. This is in fact the most costly and time-consuming route to more business. Building business with existing customers by creating ways for them to buy more and more often is a far cheaper and quicker way to increase revenues and ultimately profits.

Your Challenge

Your challenge is to know your figures and to open your mind to ways to develop each of the three ways to grow any business.

The Dimensions Of Business Growth

Your total business revenue will be made up out of the number of customers you have, multiplied by the amount they spend, multiplied by how often they spend it.

Check Your Own Dimensions Of Business Growth – Special Response Questions

How many customers do you have right now?
How much do they spend in an average transaction with you?
How many times a year do they spend this with you?
What would happen if you increased these figures by 5%, 10%, 20% or 50%?
What ideas do you have that could increase transaction value?
What ideas do you have that could increase frequency of purchase?

How To Use This Information

Evaluate some of the tactics for boosting business with existing customers and attracting new customers. Choose the best to integrate into your business and you can expect to see a measurable impact on your bottom line.

31 How To Test And Measure The Return You Get From Marketing

What Is Testing And Measuring?

Testing and measuring means finding out what specific results you are getting from the marketing activities you engage in. It is about generating some tangible facts and figures to support your future marketing plans. It will enable you to go beyond gut feel or ‘suck it and see’. By testing and measuring you will create the figures, the sales results and the numbers to support your marketing proposals.

Why Is It Important?

Do you know for sure which of your current marketing methods work the best? Can you tell where the majority of your new enquiries come from? Do you know how much of your product or service you sold as a direct result of a particular advertising campaign? If you do not have this information you have no way of learning about your business or your customers’ responses to your marketing activities. How can you fine tune your delivery to improve results if you don’t know what they are in the first place? How can you make decisions about where to spend your budget year on year? How can you decide what to drop and what to repeat? Testing and measuring the specific results you get from marketing is absolutely necessary if you want to evaluate your return on any investment you make.

Your Challenge

Your challenge will be setting up a system to test and measure each of your marketing activities. You will need the discipline to work your system until you have gathered enough information to come to meaningful conclusions. Don’t give up before you have had a chance to test and measure thoroughly. It will be worth it in the long run. You will save time, money and effort by ultimately focusing on what works and stop wasting money on what doesn’t.

Some marketing methods will be harder to test than others. Direct response marketing like advertising, direct mail, email campaigns and telesales campaigns are easier to test and measure than general brand awareness marketing like poster campaigns, transport advertising and billboards. To come to a buying decision customers may have come into contact with a number of your marketing messages over a period of time before a positive response is triggered.