Time to get back to the basics and set a strong foundation for your marketing

If you’ve been running your business for a while, you have a gold mine of information that can pinpoint which marketing techniques are working for you, and which aren’t. It’s time to do the foundational work (again!) so you can start marketing with renewed confidence.

I’m beginning a series of blog posts today about how to analyze your marketing results so you can set goals, tweak techniques, and modify your marketing plans. While I’ll primarily be talking about online marketing, I’ll make reference to local marketing, as I know many of you are running local mastermind groups or offering local classes/consulting services.

There are many steps along the marketing path, so let’s start at the beginning

The starting place is always about getting in front of your audience. For online marketers, this typically means driving traffic to your website. For local marketers, it means telephone calls and coffee/networking meetings.

The best place to analyze your website traffic is through your Google Analytics or whichever analytics your website hosting company provides. (If you don’t have Google Analytics on your website, do it!! It’s free and will offer amazing insight.)

If you’re doing internet marketing:

The first test is to compare one year’s traffic to the previous year’s traffic. Here’s what you’re looking for:

1. How many visitors are you getting each year, and is it increasing or decreasing?
2. How many pages are they viewing, and is it increasing?
3. What is your bounce rate, and is it decreasing? Which pages have the highest bounce rate and why?
4. Where is website traffic coming from, and is it increasing for each source?

If you’re doing local marketing:

1. How many inbound prospect phone calls or emails (or social media messenger, texts) do you get each week? (People asking about your products and services.)
2. How many outbound prospecting calls or emails do you make each week?
3. How many events do you attend monthly, either as a member, guest or speaker?

That’s enough to keep you busy for now. I’ll write more in the coming weeks. I don’t want to inundate you with too many tasks, or you’ll throw up your arms in despair.

P.S. It might be easiest to track these numbers on a spreadsheet, which you can keep updated monthly.

Want to learn how to start a mastermind group? Click here to get my free video tutorial on how to create a mastermind group of your own.