If you are serious about long-term success of your company, you might want to consider these areas that can help you improve profitability and efficiency throughout all departments of your company:

• Defining Processes – processes designed specifically around your products and practices, will ensure your company can continue to grow profitably
• Time Management – tracking how working time of yourself and your staff is spent will help you identify room for improvement and sometimes this can result in significant cost savings as well
• Staff Motivation – it’s about having your employees enjoy what they do and letting them participate on setting their goals and most importantly, listening to them
• Staff Training – when your workforce is well trained, their efficiency will grow tremendously. Their value will increase, and their input to the company might even double. You should train them not only in their formal area of specialization, not only in your, but also in personal and interpersonal skills – e.g. communication, time management, self motivation etc.
• Using Technology – computers, security systems, networks etc. – all these can make the work life of your employees much easier, while you could be saving a lot of money – so think about where you could invest this year so that you will reap the benefits in the long run
• Measuring Effectiveness of All Your Activities – this is the key and we will continue emphasizing it throughout the manual – only by religious tracking and then reviewing of what you and your employees do can you see the gaps for improvement

Google Analytics, or any other tool that measures yoru website’s performance, are vital for success in search engine optimisation:

• Go to Google Analytics and log in with your Google account. In the dashboard you can see a weekly or monthly overview, or any date range you choose.

• In the site usage area you can see the number of visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate (when a visitor didn’t look at any other page, just the landing page), the average time on the website and the percentage of new visits. Anyway you can choose the period of time you want to check clicking just above the graphic.

• You can also check the traffic sources overview (if they come from search engines, direct traffic or referring sites).

• In Visitors section (left menu) you can also check visitor trending, location, browsers they used, language or loyalty.

• Clicking on absolute unique visitors you can check how many people have visited the website.

• In Traffic Sources – Keywords (left menu) you can check which keywords people have been searching for to get to your website.

However, Google Analytics do not limit themselves only on the above. If you are looking to learn more about this amazing free online tracking tool, visit: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity

A very important point to keep in mind with any marketing is that you must test, test, and test again. A few hours spent ensuring that you are using correct messages can save months of useless promotion, and tons of marketing money.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on funds invested. Keep in mind that with any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know who your audience is and how to reach customers.

Here is the short explanation of what you should measure in marketing:

• Number of leads for the month – How many people contacted you?
• Value of leads for the month – How much sales can these leads generate, based on your sales conversion rate and average sales value
• Sales made for the month – How much sales did you get in a particular month?
• Number of new sales - How many sales came from new customers who had never bought from you before?
• Value of new sales - What was the value of these new sales?
• Number of outstanding opportunities – How many leads have not turned into sales yet and still look promising?
• Value of outstanding opportunities - What is the value of these outstanding leads?
• Referrals gained - How many referrals did you get in a particular month?
• Testimonials received - How many testimonials did you receive in a particular month?
• Number of sales calls per rep - How many sales calls did an average sales rep make?
• Number of sales calls made – What was the total number of sales calls made by all sales reps?
• Marketing expenditure for the month – How much did you spend on marketing in a particular month?
• Customer complaints – How many customer complaints did you receive in a particular month?

Do you know how effective is your your marketing? Which is the half of the marketing costs which you spend uselessly? How much of what you spend on marketing is actually effective?

How many sales a given campaign generates? Are the sales team happy with the quality of leads that marketing supplies?

If you don’t know answers to these questions, you don’t know how much revenue you are leaving on the table.

Therefore, you now probably need the following:

• An understanding of what actually worked and what was a waste of money
• A benchmark for success, showing you where you could have got value for money
• An idea of where to focus your future marketing budget to get results and what you should be looking at when creating your next marketing plan

Google offers a great free tool for measuring your website traffic success – Google Analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics, set up an account, add a special code to the web pages you want to track and start a great adventure of monitoring your website performance.

Google Analytics gives you handy reports on the following issues:

Content Analysis

Visitors Analysis

Traffic Sources

Goal Conversion

Among these tools you will find an answer to every question regarding your website performance. I would recommend that you create monthly reports in Excel spreadsheets (as described below) which will enable you to compare the results over time.

Specifically, you should keep an eye on these data:

Visits

Page Views

Pages/Visit

Average Time on Site

Bounce Rate – how many people left immediately after they came to the page

% New Visits

Google Page Rank – you can see this on you Google Toolbar

Goal Conversions Total

Keywords – what keywords were our website visitors looking for?

Traffic Sources – where did visitors came from?

However, the ultimate statistics talk about the VALUE all your website optimization efforts and online advertising have brought to your company.

If you want your marketing strategy to prove effective, at the end of the year we need to check whether you stuck with the plan and how well you did with the individual campaigns.

Here is a clear description of what you should measure:

• Campaign Start – When did the campaign start?
• Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
• Actual # Leads – How many leads did you actually get so far?
• Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
• Actual # Sales – How many sales did you actually get so far?
• Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
• Actual Sales Value – How much sales did the campaign generate so far?
• Expected Budget – What is your budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?
• Actual Budget – How much did you spend so far on the campaign?
• Return on Investment – How much sales did $1 of actual budget generate?

If you manage to measure these indicators regularly, you’ll be able to soon evaluate your marketing strategy, even by comparing the results on a monthly basis.

Are you aware of the potential your company has in your market?

Do you want to improve your company’s efficiency with business coaching?

Do you need to ensure your business growth?

Do you sometimes have the impression that your business remains stabgnant?

It is very important how your your company is structured, especially if you have grown to more than 20 employees.

When you now look at your chart, can you identify which departments could possibly struggle with communication among each other?

Also, it is important to note that sales and marketing should work closely with customer service department, since they need to pass feedback from each other.

Have you ever heard of Guerrilla Marketing? It’s an effective way of marketing execution for mostly small businesses but its techniques can be applied in huge corporations as well.

One of  its 15 main rules according to the founder Jay Conrad Levinson sounds as follows:

“You can actually double your profits by  measuring the results of your marketing. Some weapons hit bullseyes. Others miss the target. Unless you measure, you won’t know which are which.“

That’s why we are also keen on measurement. Above all, the advertising is an
area where the effectiveness (or efficiency?) of its spending is being widely discussed.

Click here to learn more about Advertising Effectiveness

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