STEVE MILLS - Marketing Advice for Small Businesses 1/10

Hello, Steve Mills, The Prudent Marketer here. Thank you ever so much for spending a couple of moments watching this video. You may be aware that a little while ago, in fact a couple of years ago to be honest, I wrote a book called The 10 Biggest Lead Generation Mistakes. Anyway, I've just produced 10 videos. This is the first one, and it's all based on the book. So what I'm going to do is, on each video, I'm going to talk about a mistake, a mistake that I see business owners and people responsible for marketing in business, the biggest mistakes that they make. And the first one is based around a 14-letter word, and that word is quantification. Quantification of your sales and marketing. This is probably number one in every sense of the word. I see so many businesses that, you know, I've been doing this for over 30 years now, in that time I see so many businesses that do not understand their sales and marketing numbers. Now, there's a very old saying in business, and that is you cannot manage what you do not measure. And if you're spending money on marketing and you're not measuring it, then trust me, you are definitely losing out. You just must measure your marketing. What am I talking about? Well, I'm talking about numbers like the number of inquiries you get, the percentage of those inquiries that you turn into meetings, what is your conversion rate from meeting to sale, what is your average unit of sale. You know, how many people go to your website, how many people inquire as a result of going to your website, how many contacts have you got on LinkedIn, how much business do you win on LinkedIn, what about Facebook, Twitter, and so on and so forth. If you've got a database and you're sending out emails, you're doing email marketing, well, how big's that database? What are you doing to improve it is a really important question as well. And what is your open rate, what is your click-through rate, how many inquiries do you get. All these sales and marketing numbers are really essential to your business because so many people I see, they say, well, you know, we go to exhibitions, Steve, and I said, oh really? So tell me, how many exhibitions do you do? Well, we do 10 a year. And what does that cost you? Well, it's about £10,000 a go, so it's about 100 grand. Okay, so how many leads do you get per year from exhibitions? They go, well, I don't know. Now, you know, if that was somebody working for me, I think I'd sack them straight away. You know, they just spent 100 grand of my money and I have no clue whether this is working or not. And so, you know, I really implore you, I really beseech upon you to start measuring your marketing. Now, I've just gone through a load of different things you can measure, and no doubt if you're doing loads of other marketing, there's another 40 things that you could measure. So what I'd suggest is you just start off really simple. Start off by measuring perhaps the number of leads that are coming into your business each and every month, how many of those you convert into meetings if that's part of your sort of sales system, and how many of those you turn into business. So there's only about three or four things that you can measure there. And then as you get good at this, as you get used to doing it, you can start measuring other things like your position on Google and how many clicks it takes you on your emails to get an inquiry, and so on and so forth. But let's just start off by keeping it simple. Start off doing at least something in order to grow your business. So that's it, that's my message for this video. Stay tuned and be ready for the next one. I'm going to be sharing that with you very very soon. But for now, my real hope is this: I hope you've enjoyed the video. But what I really hope is that you're going to take action as a result, because as we all know, you can go to some training like this and be trained and think, well, that guy seemed to know what he was talking about, and then do nothing and get no results. A little bit like joining the gym and never going there, and a lot of people do that, trust me. So, you know, what I want you to do is to go and take action in order to improve your business by starting to measure your sales and marketing numbers. If you need any help from us, feel free to give me a call. My telephone number is 01256 2 42272, or you can contact us at our prudentmarketer.com website. Thank you very much for listening.