Yearend is a good time to look back at the success of your business — what worked and what didn’t — over the past 12 months. An important step in evaluating your business is assessing how well your marketing plan worked for you this year.
“[Advisors] can be doing all kinds of stuff,” says Rosemary Smyth, owner of Rosemary Smyth and Associates in Victoria. “But if they don’t know what’s working, they’re like hamsters. They just keep going and going.”
So, it is not enough to be busy. You have to see what is helping grow your business.
If you have a marketing assistant or a marketing team, Smyth says, they will have their own metrics to determine your success. Ask your marketing assistant to pull together a report of the results of your firm’s marketing initiatives.
If you handle marketing on your own, Smyth says, there are three key steps to reviewing your marketing strategy:
1. Chart your marketing initiatives and results
Whether you create your chart on a computer spreadsheet or user pen and paper, list all of your marketing activities as well as some of your business statistics.
For your marketing tasks, include items such as direct mail; advertising; email marketing; cold calls; networking activities; hits on your website; and social media accounts.
Regarding business numbers, you would list data such as: revenue; expenses; number of households; and referrals.
Give yourself space on which to track these numbers year over year so you can compare your success over time. Analyse which items produced the most results, whether that means adding new clients or increased engagement with present clients.
2. Look at resources spent on marketing
The first thing to remember is that “resources” includes your money as well as your energy.
Your goal is to find out which initiatives justify the level of resources you invest in them. Let’s say you hold monthly seminars because you enjoy organizing events, but you discover that your seminar program is not leading to a larger pool of quality prospects. You will have to ask yourself: Are these events worth the resources they require?
You should also calculate a ratio of resources required to get one client, Smyth says. For example, how many networking events did you have to attend to land one new client? If the answer is 10 then your ratio is 10 to one.
When you know how much effort you need to land one client, you will not be as disappointed after attending two events without acquiring a new client. You could also try to find ways to improve those numbers.
3. Rank your marketing activities
Which marketing endeavors produced the most results? To answer this question you must know how you acquired each client — whether from a referral, your website or a direct-mail campaign. Get into the habit of jotting this information down when you begin working with a new client.
By knowing what your most effective marketing activities are, you will understand what really deserves resources.
Next: reviewing your communication strategy.