In our google analytics I saw that for “marketing controlling” and “online business blog” our incentergy pages are often shown but not often clicked because we are not shown on the first page.
So this blog post will give you 5 tips to enhance your marketing controlling and make even more money online and I will post later if this helps to enhance our google ranking for these two keywords.
1. Use analytics
This is the most important thing. Tom DeMarco says: “You can’t control what you can’t measure [1]” actually he corrected himself later that measuring is only one part, the more important part is finding the winner from the different possibilities from which you can choose.
The incentergy platform has a lot of advanced analytics functions and uses some predictive modeling techniques to directly give you the insides that you need to decide where to spend your marketing dollars.
2. Spend money on consultants
There are a lot of experts that can help you with your marketing. For example we at incentergy help our customer with:
- Setting up campaigns
- Getting in touch with the newest research results
- Summarizing analytical reports
- Implementing customized features
If you are smart you will pay the consultants based on their success. Our business model at incentergy is 100% success driven. If you don’t make any revenue you are not going to pay a single dollar for our software. This means no risk for you.
3. Ask your customers where they have heard about you
A very easy way to compare Cost-Per-Order is to just ask your customers where they have heard about you in the checkout process. A simple list could look like this:
Now it is very simple to calculate an average cost per order. Just take the amount of orders of customers that selected a certain channel and divide the marketing budget by this order.
- TV
- Radio
- Search Engine
- Display Ads
- Social Media
- Friends
- Other
You might come up with something like this:
| Channel | Budget | Orders | Cost-Per-Order |
|---|---|---|---|
| TV | 103,045.45 € | 3,003 | 34,31 € |
| Radio | 20,099.67 € | 504 | 39,88 € |
| Search Engine | 85,398.23 € | 7,899 | 10,81 € |
| Display Ads | 15,295.34 € | 199 | 76,86 € |
| Social Media | 5,334.84 € | 104 | 51,30 € |
| Friends | 0 € | 3,006 | 0 € |
| Other | 0 € | 95 | 0,00 € |
This gives you a good hint where you should spend your money. With the incentergy solution you can even learn the optimal budgets with the minimal loss.
4. Advertise in multiple channels
Try multiple channels. You will get cross channel effects. This means that you marketing spend will positively influence each other.
Further in different channels you will find different customer groups and every channel has a utility margin which means that costs per order will rise if you spend too much in one channel.
5. Always try to find better marketing channels
This is the toughest part. 20 years ago it was easy you just advertised in the newspaper and the radio. That’s it. Now there are multiple publishers, channels, target groups etc.
You have to constantly try new channels and enhance your marketing portfolio. Your competitors will do this too.
[1] Controlling Software Projects, Management Measurement & Estimation, Page 3