Spring Cleaning

When you do a spring cleaning in your home, you're taking a good look at everything around you and putting in extra effort to clean and de-clutter. The tradition of "Spring Cleaning" can also apply to your business' marketing strategies.

If a marketing strategy isn't giving you a good return on your investment, there's a very simple response...stop doing it. Marketing a business is not something that is a "one size fits all" investment. What may work for one business type may not work for yours. Even changes in location will have an effect on the response of similar marketing campaigns.

To illustrate, here are some of our client examples:

1. One of our clients was spending over $1,000 a month on a large advertisement in the Yellow Pages. After implementing a tracking program to determine from where new business was generated, they learned that only 1 or 2 people a quarter were coming to them through the Yellow Pages. The investment was definitely not giving them a good return so they cut back to a basic listing and saved thousands of dollars.
   
2. Two of our clients own automotive repair shops (our client referred us to the second shop). The first automotive repair shop had a great deal of success with placing an insert in the local AAA newspaper. We tried the same strategy for the second shop. Though their business was located in a nearby county, they received very little response from the inserts, despite testing and measuring for six months.

The point of these two examples is this. Every business owner should test and measure each marketing strategy to determine how well it's working for the money invested. Capitalize on the ones that are working and discard the ones that aren't. And don't be afraid to try new things! Just remember to test and measure each new campaign.