Your interior or landscape design business plan is only as good as your return on investment. After all, if your marketing tactics aren’t delivering growth or producing results, then your marketing efforts are not doing their job.
The only way to know how effective your strategy performs is to track marketing results.
You can learn what’s working and what’s not just by reviewing results. In turn, you figure out what you need to change in order to see growth, expansion and prosperity.
Do you know what to look for? It is critical to understand what data to track and how to track it so you can achieve that return on investment and achieve your business goals.
Numbers never lie. But which numbers are we looking at, exactly? Understanding what you need to track in your marketing will be the key to optimizing your strategies.
Leading and lagging indicators are critical components to simplifying and tracking your marketing.
A leading indicator is your marketing activity. Anything you’re doing to push information out there and draw clients in is a leading indicator.
Your leading indicators are what lead to your sales activity, and what comes out on the other end are your lagging indicators.
Lagging indicators are the results of your marketing activity.
For example, your leading indicator may be an online ad. This leads people to your website where they make a decision to contact you.
By tracking this data, you can understand how well a particular marketing tactic is working. If you’ve purchased a new online ad and saw an increasing number of clicks and then a boost in sales, you can see that the ad was effective.
Marketing activity works like a pyramid. If your marketing activity is not sufficient, you book fewer appointments. When you book fewer appointments, you’re giving fewer proposals. A lower number of proposals means not as many sales, and ultimately, less income.
That, in a nutshell, tells us just how critical it is to track marketing results and see how your efforts are playing out.
There are several areas of marketing that your home design business can benefit from. Every business and business owner have different opportunities, so various techniques might be more useful for some than others. It’s all about where you see results.
Online ads are the number one way to generate more leads for your business. However, the results greatly depend on your offer and content. Also, keep in mind, it’s not enough to just set them up and not maintain them. You have to continually optimize your ads to not waste money and receive the best return on your investment.
So how do we track online ads?
When you have online ads, you can look at the data to see the number of impressions it accumulates - or, how many people have seen it or interacted with it. Then, you can also track the number of clicks the ad produces.
From there, you can jump over to the number of conversions, and finally, how many appointments you’ve actually booked based on that sequence.
Social media is a widely used form of advertising and marketing as most consumers are on social media.
The goal with social media marketing and tracking is to create captivating content that draws the attention of your followers and also leads to more followers. In turn, that leads to more engagement. In the end, you have data backing up the number of appointments you have booked.
After all is said and done, you’ve tracked your specific marketing techniques and can see what’s working and what’s not, you can ultimately track your sales.
At the very top of the sales funnel is your overall marketing activity. What have you been doing to boost your company’s revenue stream and clientele list?
From there, you move down to your appointments booked. Across the board, how many meetings have you scheduled through your marketing efforts?
Following your appointments will be the number of proposals you have given. More appointments mean more proposals, which are excellent opportunities to secure sales. And sales is your next level.
How have your sales done following the proposals you’ve given?
And finally - what does your income look like after all of this?
Using a scorecard is a simple, easy way to track marketing results using four necessary steps:
When creating your scorecard, begin with your leading indicators.
Whether you’re using social media, online ads, events, or something else, make a list of all your activity.
On the right-hand side, make one column for your goals, and another for your accruals.
Below your leading indicators, make a list of your sales activities, such as proposals given, sales won and your monthly income.
To the right of this list, make a column for your goals and a column for your accruals.
Use the instructions above to properly implement your scorecards into your marketing tracking.
At Home Designer Marketing, our mission and passion are to help design professionals initiate effective marketing plans to see real results and showcase their businesses online.
One of the ways we help you get to that next step is through our workshops providing resources and specific guidance in areas of your business including Marketing, Sales, Operations and Finances. Sign up for our free group workshops today to help grow your business.
You can also book a free 1-hour consultation and to discuss your business goals and objectives and how we might be able to help you achieve them.
