Why Is Tracking Your Marketing So Important? - American Window Cleaner Magazine

Most have a clue why it’s important, but unfortunately, most don’t take the time to do anything about it. I just finished a 4-day boot camp for my Window Washing Wealth clients. I went deep into the importance of tracking every marketing campaign, how to do it right, and why.

Three in the room said, “it’s hard for me to find the time after a hard day’s work in the field. It’s the last thing I want to do once I get home.” And I get that, but I followed that up by saying if you don’t analyze this one key performance indicator, your business will be like a ship in the ocean without any navigation. You will have only a gut feeling of what you spend and what you make from each marketing medium and only a gut feeling if it is working or not working.

And that’s just not good enough!

In other words, the workday is not done until the leads are generated and jobs sold for the day are put into the CRM or a marketing tracking spreadsheet. It may be 10 minutes or 20 minutes, but that little bit of time will change the course of your company.

If there are two reports needed, one is absolutely the Marketing Tracking Report. And the other is an accurate Profit and Loss Statement (see Dan Platta’s well-written articles in this publication). These are the reports that make hard factual decisions for our companies (among others).

When you run your business without properly tracking sales and marketing, you are blindly making decisions.

How do you know what marketing mediums are actually effective, if you are not tracking the sales? How do you know where to spend your money if you don’t know what the results of your marketing efforts are? How do you know which ones to ‘roll out’ with?

This marketing report shows what works and what doesn’t and what you should focus on to increase effectiveness. You’ve heard the expression before,

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Credit: Daniel Miller

And if you’re not measuring and monitoring your marketing efforts, you’re likely wasting your dollars and don’t even know it.

The only way to know what is working and what isn’t is to track it. Only then can you make educated decisions for your business.

So, what do you track? At my company, we look at 9 metrics from each marketing medium. Marketing mediums include Existing Customer Call-Ins, Referrals, Email Blasts, and the usual marketing methods. It does not include the Website or ‘Other.’ The website is like your office. It would help if you found out what got them to “walk-in.”

Here’s the 9 (for each marketing medium in your marketing arsenal:

Count (flyers, postcards, door hangers)
Number of leads acquired
Number of jobs sold
2 and 3 determine Conversion %
Total job revenue $
Advertising Cost for revenue $
5 and 6 determine ROI (return on investment)
Customer Job Dollar Average
Was it Break Even or higher?

Note: If it is break-even, it is still a win, provided you know how to market and nurture the customer for ongoing services. The average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) we find is 5 to 7 years. Keep this in mind. See, you may be only breaking even on the front end, but your ROI continues to increase on the back end. Don’t cancel a marketing campaign just because it’s break-even.

Likewise, you may have a bad marketing month for lead generation for whatever reason: economy, storms, season, etc. Take this into account too. Give any marketing method 90 days to kick in a while studying the KPI’s every month. If still not working:

Consider scrapping that marketing medium
Go back to the drawing board and re-design, tweak the campaign, and test again.

How do you most effectively track the leads?

A lot of your marketing (depending) will generate phone calls. The best way to track the effectiveness of your marketing and measure “call-in” volume is to use call tracking. You make a different telephone number for each marketing format and track incoming calls using the software with call tracking.

It will be 95% spot-on in determining exactly where the leads are coming from. Each advertisement must have a designated telephone number like different bandit signs, flyers by area, each postcard campaign, and google. Call tracking can be used for almost every marketing medium, including radio commercials, television commercials, direct mail, print advertisements, and social media posts.

Many companies provide call tracking solutions, and you can also check with your current telephone company to see if that is something they offer. It has proven to be invaluable to the preciseness of tracking our marketing.

Knowing these numbers will allow you to make far better decisions with your marketing efforts.

Jim DuBois is founder of WindowWashingWealth.com. a high-level, window cleaning specific business coaching program. Visit the site for a FREE BUSINESS BUILDING MANUAL, and/or FREE BUSINESS CONSULT. I can be reached at [email protected] or call 704-451-0409.