Over the last few episodes I’ve talked about some very important and critical elements when it comes to making your marketing & advertising profitable. Today, I’m going to talk about rule number 5 and that is – track your marketing!
You know how much it costs you to pour a captain and coke, you know how much it costs you to send out a burger, but do you know what the cost is to get a customer? You should and the only way you can do this is by tracking your marketing! Yes this does take a little bit of extra effort but this effort will save you a shit load of money by knowing what ads working and what media’s are working.
A big mistake that a lot of bar owners are making is they just throw out an ad about their specials and promotions, but they have no way to track their marketing. If you have no way to track your marketing you will never know if you made money or lost money from your marketing efforts. If you lost money, you know to either change the media you are using or change up the offer or the special. If your marketing was profitable, now it’s time to figure out how you can increase the response rate and make it even more profitable.
There are multiple ways to track your marketing but one of the easiest is through mailings. I track a majority of my marketing through postcards. When I’m trying to get brand new customers in my bar or my clients bar’s, we use targeted mailing lists, create a great offer, and send it through postcards in the mail. In order for these people to take advantage of the offer they must bring in the postcard or cut out the coupon on it.
Then I have my staff staple the offer to the receipt and I keep track of these every month. After the offer expires I total up the amount I spent on the marketing campaign compared to the sales and new customers it brought in.
Once you find a couple winners, where you make money every time, you now have an evergreen marketing campaign that you can keep running and profiting from.
This isn’t rocket science, it’s simple. Just remember that each time you spend a penny on marketing, how are you going to track the results. How are you going to know who comes in from that ad? If you are not tracking your marketing dollars I’m willing to bet you’re losing thousands of dollars a year on wasteful marketing.
That’s it for today and I will see you on the next show.
