Should You “Ctrl+A” Your Marketing?

What the hell does that headline mean? I obviously wrote it to grab your attention. Now let me earn your attention.

“Ctrl+A” or “Command+A” for you Mac users is a common key command used for selecting everything within a defined area. You literally hold down the Ctrl (Control) key and push A and you will select “all” of the contents within the area where your mouses cursor is. It’s a handy little short cut to know. So what does this have to do with me, my business or anything for that matter?

Well, savvy business owners understand that marketing helps fuel sales. They also understand that it’s never “just one thing,” meaning at any given time you should have multiple marketing channels out there generating new leads. Here’s the rub. Many times, business owners will do a bunch of stuff, all at once, without effectively tracking what is working and what is not. I call this “Ctrl+A Marketing”. You select all, and go for it without figuring out what is actually working.

This almost always is a big waste of time and money.

Just because you got sold into some ad in your local paper and the phone is ringing, doesn’t mean that ad is working. Let’s say you also have the same phone number on your website, a direct mail piece you did, and a radio ad you are running (and probably paying too much for). You have no clear picture of what marketing is working and what marketing may be draining money from your marketing budget. Perhaps that direct mail piece has generated 20 new phone calls while your newspaper ad hasn’t generated any. You see where I am going with this.

In the day to day activities as a business owner, it’s easy to get caught up and stop accurately tracking your marketing. In fact, you may have inadvertently omitted tracking your different marketing altogether. It’s O.K. I’ll forgive you this time. But let’s not let that happen again, agreed?

Instead of “Ctrl+A” style marketing, where you blast it all out there hoping that something works, I prefer “Ctrl+Click Marketing”.

For the uninitiated, holding down the “Ctrl” key while clicking precise files allows you control over which files you select, versus the Ctrl+A which automatically selects everything. With the “Ctrl+Click Marketing” attitude, you can fine tune your marketing based on what is working. If you are not noticing a return from a specific marketing piece after it has run for a while (depends on frequency but use your good judgment on how long it should run before you see a response) then can it. Conversely, if you are seeing a good return on a piece of marketing, invest more marketing dollars until you cap out on ROI. At some point, no matter how good the marketing piece is, simply throwing more money at it won’t help get you better results.

The point is, don’t assume that just because you are “doing it all” that it is all working. Hand pick the best of your marketing and cut out the filler. Monitor, track, analyze and assess your marketing. There are lots of dollars to be made and lots of dollars to be saved in that zone alone. (no rhyme intended)