The Yellow Pages Association’s Small Business Marketing Poll found that almost two-thirds of small business owners prefer to do their own marketing. When they do spend money on marketing, they don’t always measure results:
- 56% do not measure ROI (return on investment) to measure marketing program success.
- only 21% use telephone calls as a measure success.
- Interestingly, 26% of small business owners do not use any type of measurement for their marketing programs.
About their use of Web marketing, SearchEngineWatch.com reports that roughly 55% of small businesses have never even tried online advertising.
Are small business owners simply unaware of the many cheap marketing options on the Web? Or are small business owners correctly avoiding unproductive marketing campaigns? Many tourism businesses have no clue.
This year, ask Santa for a pen and paper.
Then for a New Year’s Resolution, put your new pen and paper beside the phone and tracking your phone calls!
Put a simple checklist together:
I like to record:
- Date
- Whether this is the first time they called or a followup
- How they heard about us (if a Web search, what were they hoping to find?)
- Web site – always ask what Web site the caller is on (you might be delightfully surprised that it is not yours!)
Next year, when you are trying to figure out where to spend your marketing dollars, you’ll have a good bit of information to help you make those difficult decisions.
The alernative, keep doing what you are always doing, but then, as the saying goes, you’ll keep getting the same results.
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