Avalanche PR logo

2009 – Year of the Return

As 2009 kicks in and the forecasted difficult year becomes more of a reality, it’s a good time to focus on return on investment.

Now that companies can’t afford to haemorrhage budget on advertising and non-delivering initiatives (could they ever?!), it’s the perfect time to put in place measures to ensure every pound spent on marketing is followed up on.

It sounds obvious but, are you asking your customers how they’ve heard about you?   Do you ask every customer?

Assuming you keep a database of your contacts, do you then record the above against these records?  Keeping track of which customers have bought which products or services as a result of specific marketing initiatives will prove invaluable.  Continue to assess the merits of your marketing efforts and it’ll become much easier to establish what marketing budget to assign to specific initiatives in the future.

To really get to the bottom of what makes your customers tick (and attract more of the same) why not introduce questionnaires to be answered by your customers?  These don’t need to be lengthy documents, but do need consideration on the content to ensure the responses gained give an indication of your customer lifestyles, personal interests and choice of media.

The information collated from these questionnaires can then be used to help fine-tune your marketing, to help ensure it attracts more of the target customers you have in mind.

As above, the responses from these questionnaires should be recorded against each contact’s detail on your database.

To make your marketing pound stretch and work as hard as possible, it makes sense to try and capture as much information as possible on the tactics you use that do attract customers.

As every business owner is only too aware, it’s all about the bottom line and marketing which proves itself to add to this will prove more valuable than ever this year.