So when you’re doing anything at all throughout your business (and again I’m talking mostly about marketing), what you want to do is measure anything and everything that can you can get your grubby little paws on. What I mean, is whether it’s something that you’re doing to garner views on social media, or whether it’s money that you’re spending for advertising or for hiring somebody to do a job, you need to be able to measure these things.
There are certain things that are very easy to measure. For instance, you have a thousand dollars in your pocket you spend two hundred dollars on a lunch for clients. That’s easy. A thousand minus two hundred, you have eight hundred dollars. That’s fairly easy. You put out a new advertisement. You have to trust the media that you’re getting the information from that forty three thousand people saw your particular advertisement and then you got two new clients from having that run. That’s fairly easy. But when you start doing things like putting out a video that you created and you want to know what the return on investment is. How many new clients did you get from that? You’ve got to be able to measure that.
One of the best ways to measure, especially if you get a new client, is to ask “Hey how did you hear about us?” You may be investing heavily in a new advertisement and you get several new clients and you automatically assume it’s because of the advertisement. Don’t assume – you need to be able to measure everything. So ask them, “How did you find us?” You may find out that one of your current clients went on a recommendation spree and he recommended you ten different people and three different people showed up. This is the kind of thing that you need to know.
You need to be able to measure any number of different things in your business because if you can measure it then you can manage it. If you can’t measure it then you can’t manage it. If you don’t know how your expensive new advertisement – or even your cheap new advertisement – is working, you have no idea whether you need to change it, make it better, or offer a different service or product through the advertisement. You have no idea but you need to be able to measure it, and the best way to do that is by asking whoever might know the answer.
If you’ve got an ad going you know go talk to the media; “How many people saw this ad?” If you get a new client you need to talk to them, ask them “How did you find us?” But either way you’re going to be a lot happier if you can measure your results and you can figure out who’s seeing everything that you doing and what the results are.