Are you someone who is passionate about your business, but a bit more relaxed in tracking and analysing your sales leads?

While this approach is familiar in small business, it could be a handbrake to the future growth you are seeking.

The price of not being organised

I remember my accountant telling me about her clients who would turn up with a shoebox of receipts at the end of each financial year, asking her to run their accounts urgently based on this disorderly mess. It was urgent, because they didn’t know how much tax they owed.  Compare this to the operator who runs their business via Xero each month, and knows exactly where they stand financially.   

Few would think of the shoebox as an option these days.  However, it’s common for people to manage their sales leads with a similar level of disorder.  And the tax they pay in this case is spending too much on their marketing costs.

Start with what you have

For those of us who don’t naturally think systematically, the habit of tracking and measuring contacts sometimes isn’t an easy one to form. 

The easiest place to start is with a simple Excel spreadsheet. Each time a contact is made, either by phone or email, take a few seconds to make an entry on the spreadsheet with their name and contact details. At regular intervals, depending on volumes, you can then split these contacts according to whether they were good leads (resulting in a sale) or bad. 

This simple data set, when supplied to a digital marketing partner like Ark Advance, will consistently help to refine and target ads to where those good leads came from. 

For a relatively small investment, say $30 per month, you can then expand into using a CRM system. This enables you to keep a central repository of all your customers’ contact and transaction details, categorise them and automate handy tools like regular communications.

Assuming a growth mindset

At first this can all seem like extra process for the sake of it, but the real power of digital advertising lies in measurement.  

We touched on the concept in our earlier blog, Zero to Hero: Rate your leads for better performance. You’re in business, so you know you have to advertise – you are no doubt putting plenty of thought into who your customers are and where to find them. The next step is to find out what you are spending to reach each genuine customer, and which of your ads are the most effective. You can then be confident in focusing future spending on the media and messages that are bringing you the most business. 

There is also the benefit of simply being organised; a shoebox approach might work when you have five customers, but not when you have 50! So think big from the start.

Running the numbers

When you’re in control and have an established routine for data capture, you can really start to look at where each dollar is going.

Working with measurable data, for example, you can find out the maximum you will want to pay for each lead. Let’s say you make a sale out of every 10 leads, on average. If a sale is $1,000, and marketing is $300, no lead can cost more than $30 and be profitable. So in this case, we can tell Google to only give you only conversions/leads if they are less than a $30 spend.

If you find that 1 in 10 leads produces a sale, after a few months, you can also find out what ads gave you the customers, and which didn’t. 

A few simple steps can place the power of your own data in your hands. To get started, get in touch today – it’s our job to make it easy.