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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Ileana Tudor
April-May 2017

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Data Analytics

Most small- to mid-size companies spend 10 to 15 percent of their annual budget on marketing and advertising.

 They invest in upgrading their websites,

creating content, sending out emails, organizing events and sending out flyers or postcards. But while significant efforts are spent on executing these marketing initiatives, little is done to track and measure their effectiveness.

Why is measurement important?

As Peter Drucker, the father of modern management once said, what gets measured gets improved. Essentially, without insight into what drives sales and revenues, it’s difficult to know what to do more of and what to stop doing altogether. Ideally all marketing decisions a company makes should be based on data and information.

How to track and measure successfully

1. Profile and segment

Profiling and segmenting your prospects and customers is important because, generally speaking, your customer base will not be homogenous. Whether they are businesses or individuals, your customers will differ in size, geographic location, demographics, how they buy, how they make decisions and how they conduct business relationships.

Understanding your customers or prospects and categorizing them into segments (groups that share specific characteristics) is crucial to successfully targeting and engaging with them over time. Having an insight into their behaviors and motivating factors allows you to design marketing campaigns that address their particular needs and preferences.

For example, let’s assume your company manufactures fabrication tools for solid surfaces. Your prospects will most likely be builders, general contractors or solid surface installers. They are spread out across the U.S. and range in size from single operators to large shops. Some do business exclusively online; others prefer to call in orders by phone.

It’s highly unlikely that an undifferentiated marketing message and strategy will resonate equally with all your prospects. Therefore, it may make sense to create several segments that you will target separately – perhaps the smaller, manual shops in one category, the larger installers in another, and the builders and general contractors in a third.

You may also want to create a separate segment for existing customers so you can build marketing initiatives designed to generate additional business. In summary, your marketing materials will be specifically designed with each of those audiences’ needs in mind.

2. Track and measure

Once you’ve profiled and segmented your prospect and customer base, you’re ready to track and measure the performance of your marketing programs. This isn’t as intimidating or time-consuming as it sounds. You can track your website performance using Google Analytics, which includes everything from number of visits, unique visitors, number of pages visited to the bounce rate (the amount of time someone stays on a page).

When it comes to email performance, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, offer great analytics for each campaign, showing the number of emails that were opened, deleted, sent to the “Spam” folder, or read. If you create regular content on your website, such as through a blog, you can track performance through the link you include in the call to action (CTA).

For events, you can track performance through number of attendees and registration information. Print campaigns (flyers or postcards) sometimes offer challenges when it comes to tracking. These can be addressed by creating a separate URL for each campaign so you can measure the effectiveness of each piece you send.

Social media is fairly easy to track based on number of followers, likes or shares. If you use educational content on your social media platforms, you can track effectiveness through the traffic each post drives to your website.

3.Interpret and inform

The last component in your marketing analytics approach is to interpret the data you’ve collected, draw conclusions and use that knowledge in the next round of marketing initiatives. For example, let’s say your data indicates that email marketing is much more successful than your blog content.

So much so, in fact, that it makes sense to stop writing original content for your blogs and simply replace it with your email copy. You’ve now eliminated one task that wasn’t producing results and you can use the additional time and resources to focus on more targeted content in your email marketing campaigns.

You may also notice that most of your prospects and clients are on Facebook and Twitter, but almost none of them are active on LinkedIn. You may decide to amp up the frequency of posts on the first two, and eliminate posts on LinkedIn. By tracking registration data for your prospect and customer events, you can look at trends over time and determine whether your time and marketing dollars are best spent here.
As technology continues to change the landscape of marketing for large and small companies alike, the ease and the importance of data-driven decision making continues to grow. Tracking and measuring whether your marketing efforts are increasing your sales and revenue should be an ongoing practice for all company owners.

Contact: Ileana Tudor is founder and managing director of Tudor Business Consulting Inc.: 952.479.1174; igt@tudorbusinessconsulting.com;
www.tudorbusinessconsulting.com