You must be able to calculate the efficiency of your advertising efforts. When wedding photographers say their advertising is working, they generally just know that they are receiving calls and booking weddings. You must know more than this.
You must know if your marketing is efficient or not. The best way to give yourself the answer to this question is through the use of statistics. As a business owner that wants to succeed, you have a responsibility to track the statistics of your business. Through marketing you begin to attract individuals to your business. These individuals are inquiries, and you must ask each inquiry one basic question in order to create the statistics you need:
How did you hear about us?
Keep track of the following after your initial contact with your inquiry:
- How many of your inquiries did you convert into consultations?
- How many of these consultations did you convert into paying customers?
- How many of your paying customers have you converted into repeat customers?
The answers to these questions will show you where you are the least efficient. If you see that you are only converting 10% of the inquiries you receive into consultations and 90% of the consultations you have are converted into paying customers, you know you must change the language used when answering your phone or replying to people inquiring about your services via email.
Tracking each and every inquiry will also tell you where your paid advertising is failing or succeeding. You do not need to focus on the ads that are doing the best until you have addressed the ones that are doing the worst.
You should be able to find out the “cost per lead” for each of the ads you have purchased. For example, if you paid $1000 for an ad somewhere and you received 10 phone calls from that ad, your cost per lead is $100. Think of it this way, when that phone rings, you are spending $100.
Being able to find your cost per lead for each of your paid ads is essential to becoming more efficient. This information will allow you to make educated decisions when the contracts for your ads expire. You will know which ads to keep and which to drop. You may decide to change the language in one ad to see if you can create different results. You may decide to take the money from one ad and use it to increase the size of another ad that is working better. If you do not have a system in place allowing you to track your cost per lead, you are just shooting in the dark, wasting your money and time. That is inefficient.
This next point is important. If you do decide to change an element in your weakest advertisement, make sure you only change one thing at a time. In the long run, this will give you clearer understanding as to whether or not the changes you have made are working. If you change too much all at once, you have no idea what specific alteration created the change, good or bad, and it will be harder for you to repeat the action in the future.



Leave a Comment