PLANNING & TRACKING – Marketing Tracker

Speaker 1:

So, a lot of people come to me asking questions. Questions like, "Where's the best place to advertise? What marketing activity will get me the best result?" Or, "A rep from Houzz suggested I take out a more expensive package with them, should I do it?" And the answer is always, "Show me your numbers," because if you can't tell me what your numbers for your marketing activities are, I can't tell you what you should be doing or not doing. So the numbers I'm interested in seeing are things like, what's your cost per lead from each of these different activities? What is your cost per meeting? What is your cost to acquire each client, the cost per client? And then, what's the overall return on investment? If you've spent $500, how much money did you make? How many projects did you get, and what was those projects worth for you to make $500?

Speaker 1:

So, knowing how to calculate these numbers, and where to find these numbers, is a tracking exercise, and it's what I want to take you through now. I want to give you a tracking sheet, which is a spreadsheet, and allow you to identify all these numbers. And when you've got all these numbers on a spreadsheet, then decision-making around marketing becomes easy. So let's get into the training.

Speaker 1:

Right. So, we're going to look at the spreadsheet that you can get access to from Google Docs. All right? It's a tracking sheet, so it allows you to work out your numbers. Really, really useful, particularly if you're doing a lot of different promotional activities, but even if you're just doing a few, and you like to analyze what's working and what's not working, this little baby's for you. So there's the URL. You need to go there. You can make a copy of the spreadsheet in Google Docs somewhere yourself, and you can make multiple copies. So, if you make a copy, go and play with it, find you've mucked things up, you can just go in again, and make another copy of a completely clean sheet, and go and mark it up again. You can mark it up as many times as you want.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, let me take you through some of the key concepts. So what we're looking to do, is find out, what is your cost per lead? What is your cost per client? Cost per meeting? That type of stuff. So cost per lead, is just simply, how much have you spend on a particular marketing activity, divided by the number of leads you get, and that's your cost per lead for the month, or for the year. And same formula, cost per consultation, or cost per meeting, you'll want to know, what did you do? What sort of costs did you have? And, how many meetings did you get?

Speaker 1:

So let's say you spent $200 on an activity, and you got four leads, then what it's going to be? It's going to be $25 a lead. And let's say you got two meetings, or two consultations, it's going to be $50 per consultation, right? So now you know what each consultation costs you. And if those numbers are consistent, the more you do something, or the more you spend, then what you could do, is get to a situation where you're effectively buying clients. And particularly this works on social media apps, where the more you spend, the more leads you get, and the more leads you get, the more appointments you get, and the more appointments you get, the more clients you get. So really it's just a case of, "How many clients do I want," and you can dial-up the numbers.

Speaker 1:

Once you've got a proven formula for generating the leads and the clients, often the numbers stay reasonably consistent. It's just a case of throwing more money at that lead source that has proven to work. Okay? Now getting it to that stage is the art, and that's what you can work on with us. And the cost per client's the same thing. This is the most important one. A lot of people get too excited when they see a whole lot of leads coming in and they go, "Great, I've got 10 leads," but if none of them turn into projects, it doesn't really matter how many leads you got. What really matters, is how many projects. So there might be another lead source. Let's say it's dirty 30 referrals, let's say from your newsletter. And you only got two leads from it, but they both turned into clients. Well, I'll take the two clients, and the two leads, over the 10 leads and the no clients. Right? It's kind of self-explanatory, but when you start analyzing data, you can forget simple things like that.

Speaker 1:

There is a wee catch, and I'll show you an extra tab on the spreadsheet, which we're going to go to and have a look at a moment, but some projects don't happen until months later. So when you're filling out this monthly promotional tracking sheet on a month by month basis, it may be hard to fill in, because if the projects haven't happened until three months later, then we need a special tab to be able to keep track of the fact that, actually the lead came in, in January, and therefore it's January's marketing effort that should be attributed with the success, not April's. Because it's what you did in January to get them.

Speaker 1:

And one other thing, the tabs are a little bit sneaky. They like to hide. So let me show you the spreadsheet, and I'll go through how to use it, and all that type of stuff. So behold, here is the AMI [Six Maps? 00:05:29] Marketing Tracker. Now, the key thing to note... Let's start right at probably the most important part, and that is down the bottom. Now, these are the tabs, and you can see here, Dashboard, Leads, January, February, March, April, May. Okay? Now notice how the tabs just moved in. So the sneaky thing I said, how the tabs like to [inaudible 00:05:54], is you need to play with these arrow buttons first. So you can see that all the tabs are there up until May, but then oops, goes through... Now it's May to November, and now it's July to December. And you might say, "Well, what happened to the dashboard?" Well, you have to click on the scroll arrow, and scroll your way back.

Speaker 1:

Now notice there... This catches me out. This is the reason I'm telling you. I go, "Where'd it go? Where'd it go?" And I forget that there's these wee arrows, and then I scroll back, oops. Now if I go to the end and I go arrow back and I go, "But the marketing dashboard's still not there." Well, I have to click twice. Notice how it goes a bit again. So it catches me out, and that's why I'm saying... I want to save you the time and embarrassment of coming out. So these tabs are really important. So what are? First one's the dashboard.

Speaker 1:

Now, first thing I'll say about the dashboard, is there a two... Where on the dashboard? You've got to click on the dashboard. Right. There are two charts here, or two spreadsheets. All very good. Now, notice the words here, automatically populated up the top, and automatically populated down here. That means you don't need to change any of the numbers in here, they will be populated from these ones here. And the only spreadsheet I've populated so far is January, so this thing here should... Notice, we've got one, 100, four, two, one, one? That has been picked up, and it's been taken through to here, one, 100, four, two, two...

Speaker 1:

Now, as we go through to February, and I do more activities, and I fill this one out, and I say, "Yep, we're doing a number of activities. One here, and the cost is 200, and the leads is four, and the free consultation is two, and the LCCs are one, the new projects won is one," and all that type of stuff. You can see it's added into the sheet here. So don't touch the numbers in here. If I click on here, you'll see the formula. What it's doing is taking all the data from each of the months, and it's summarizing it up here. Okay?

Speaker 1:

Now what you can change in this, is you can change the activities that you're going to do. You might not do these activities, and so if you're going to do different activities, then you would go to your month... Let's say... This is just a test. So, let's say I'm going to do a speaking workshop or something like that. Now, if I add that in up the top here, it won't change on the summary, because these ones here, you can change. But what you've got to do is make sure you line up... Anything that you have in your monthly things here, you've got to replicate them, as to exactly what you're going to do in here.

Speaker 1:

Now, these are some suggestions, but you certainly don't need to do this stuff here. So now, this is the other catch. If you're going to do a speaking workshop, these things, you need to keep them consistent across all the months. So by all means, add more stuff down here. But if I'm going to add, I don't know, cold calling... hopefully you don't end up having to do cold calling... but if I did do cold calling, and I added that in... it's line number 18, or 14 on the thing... then I would need to... Cold calling. So I wouldn't need to add... And it'll tell me, "Do you want to..." Right. So, it'll warn me that I'm looking to change this main sheet. Don't change these numbers in here, but certainly organize what you're going to be doing in here, align them all up, and you need to line them up the same every month.

Speaker 1:

Now, do you find out that in January you start out doing these things here, but over the year it changes, if you're going to add any other things you're going to do, add them down below here, in here, or add them on a line where they don't exist. So you need to add them at the bottom of whatever list that you're going to have, so that it lines up when it gets summarized on the dashboard. Okay? Because the dashboard is a summary of what you've got in here, but you need to keep each of these tabs consistent.

Speaker 1:

... at the top. So you'll list your different marketing activities you're going to do. Remember, keep them same from month to month. You may have nothing down the bottom to start with, and then you may have nothing at the top if you no longer want to do speaking, but leave that line there because it's in the dashboard up the top as well. If you're going to have it there. Right? So a number of activities. If I'm doing speaking, how many speaking activities am I doing? Just one. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Costs. This is an interesting one. So let's say you pay $100 to go and do a speaking engagement. Maybe that's the cost of hiring the room and, I don't know, getting the whiteboard pens, or maybe costs you $100 to pay someone else to do a speaking engagement in front of their audience. Or maybe, it's just one hour of your work, but you're saying, "Well, it's not really costing me anything. Someone has organized something for me to speak at, and technically it's not costing me anything, but actually it's costing you an hour of your time. So put a price on your time, because it's unfair to say it costs you nothing. You could've been doing something else.

Speaker 1:

So if you say, "I'm going to charge myself out for marketing activities at $100," then you might say, "Well, took me half an hour to get there. I spoke for half an hour. I'm going to charge myself out at an hour, and that's $100." Okay, number of leads acquired from that activity? How many consultations did those leads turn into? How many LCCs did those leads turn into? How many new projects? Now, average fee value... You can map this up however you like, but for me, I wouldn't be including when you pass on the costs of, let's say, engineers or anything else, I'd just be doing the fees for my project.

Speaker 1:

And we're just going to take an average fee value... So let's say, just for my work, it's $20,000, and my margin is 80% because I work from home, and I don't have too many expenses. And that's how I do my average fee and profit margin. All these numbers will then be worked out. So my cost per lead is $25 per lead. So $100 divided by four leads. That's calculated. All these are calculated. Percentage of leads that go to a consultation, I can see half of them end up wanting to have a chat with me, so my cost per consult is $50. Two leads divided by 100, or 100 divided by two is 50.

Speaker 1:

Cost per consult, percentage of consults that turn into LCC, 50%. Half of them... Cost per LCC. Because I only got one LCC, and it costs me $100 to run this speaking activity, it's cost me $100 to get that LCC. But it's not bad if I'm charging two and a half grand for an LCC. Profit per margin, great. It's $16,000, because it's calculated from 80% of 20,000. And if my cost is $100, which is not very much, then therefore my profit after my lead cost is 15,900. Okay? So, my return on investment for the $100 I invested, I'm getting back 15,090. So my percentages 15090%.

Speaker 1:

Now, these numbers don't mean much, because I've put in the same figures, just dummy numbers, but as you put in different dollar amounts for what you've invested, and how many different leads you've got, what you're going to start to see is the return on investment in terms of... And [inaudible] the success of each different activity will be very different. And by seeing which activities are more successful than others, you're going to be able to say, "I'm going to do more of the stuff that's working really well." Maybe you'll cut doing some of the stuff that's not working so well, or you'll change it. So these are all the different tabs.

Speaker 1:

Just remember you fill in... This is January. Remember this is the January tab, so you fill in everything that's yellow, and these numbers get automatically calculated for you. All right? So hopefully that helps with your analysis of how effective any of your different marketing strategies are. Okay. Then if we go down to the monthly summary, this really just summarizes everything. So number of marketing activities, seven, total number of leads from all the different marketing activities, 28. This is a pretty busy firm, right? Number of consultations, 14. Number of leads who book a consult. Number of clients... And what it's doing, is really just taking a summary of what's happening up here, but it's summarizing the whole lot for the month. Okay? Now you probably not going to run that many activities if you're a smaller firm, but you can see how the numbers work. Okay?

Speaker 1:

So we got January, February, March. What you're going to do, is you're going to schedule a little bit of time once a month to update your monthly lead tracking. Okay? And remember, it'll give you the ability to know what's working and what's not. So as we go to this sheet over here, we can look down all the different activities we've been doing, and we can scroll across, and we can see the profit margin, the cost per lead, the cost per meeting, cost per client, and the return on investment for all the different activities. Return on investment for all the different activities.

Speaker 1:

Now, in this case, because I've used some very basic numbers, these are all showing the same, 15000%. So, that's pretty good. For every dollar they've spent, you're getting $15.90 back. But that's only because of the numbers I've used. Okay. So, hopefully that is understandable. You just need to go in there and play with it, and understand it. Now, the tricky bit is, okay, I've said I got two leads, and in this case I won two projects, but it's unlikely that you're going to win two projects in the month that you booked it.

Speaker 1:

So let's say it's January, and I got one activity, I spent $100, got four leads. That's great. Free consults two, LCCs one, and I won a new project out of it. Now, you may not win a new project... if this is January... you might not get the answer in January for that new project. It might not come through till October, right? So how do I assign that, that speaking engagement I did back in January, is where I supposed to put the new project that I won?

Speaker 1:

Well, what you do, is you go to the leads form here, and this is where you track individual leads. So if you get a lead come in, and let's say Paul McCartney comes in, and he wants an apartment remodel, and I give it a name and a number, lead source was a referral from Ringo Starr. I stuck it in, in the 2nd of January, 2020. The next step is to have a meeting. Here's the date for my meeting. Now, some of these tabs, if it's dates, if you just click on it, you'll see a calendar pop up, and you can populate that. So again, here's the date for the meeting. Great.

Speaker 1:

Do I need to send Paul McCartney any marketing material? You can put in, yes, if I... some stuff before the meeting. Do I need to send them anything about the LCC? Have I submitted a proposal? Has the client said yes or no? Roughly what's the fee? Where's the location? In this case I won it on the 25th of the third. Any notes? So he wants a second house in the West Hamptons, and the Hamptons in New York. Great. Nice little lead.

Speaker 1:

Now, because I've tracked this Paul McCartney lead, and we entered it on the 2nd of January, then I know that... And maybe he attended a workshop I ran. I know, that when I put down projects won, I can put it down in January, because it was the workshop in January that I did it, even though Paul McCartney didn't come in as a lead until... When did he become a client? Date won. Okay. The 25th of January, February, March. Okay? So, I don't add in here that I won him from my speaking in March, I put it that I won it from my speaking gig in January. And that way I know that, that speaking workshop is a really good one. Maybe I do other speaking workshops later on, they're not as effective. I need to know that the workshop I delivered in January, was the one that got me the project. Okay? It's just a case of understanding what works and what doesn't.

Speaker 1:

Now, you can keep it really simple, and that's fine, but you can go into as much detail as you want to, by breaking your lead sources down in here. But just remember, the tabs... Don't get caught out like me, by losing tabs, you've just got to scroll along the bottom. Okay? Remember, on the dashboard, you don't touch these numbers. These are really just a compilation of these ones. And you can change these in here, and you should, depending on what you're going to do, but whatever you have in these months need to be consistent from month to month. So if you're going to have this set of activities, you need to have them in all line items. And if you want to add any, you add them to the bottom, and then just remember to add it on the dashboard in the bottom as well. So that's it.