Be Where The Buyers Are…

Marketing 101: Be Where Buyers Look for Your Products.  Here is a quick demonstration of this philosophy at work followed by a re-visit to our old friend ROI.

ThomasNet provides free Website tracking to all clients called WebTraxs.  It’s very good tracking designed to highlight sales and marketing stats over IT type stats.  (NOTE: Some proprietary info has been removed in the slides below.)

This page shows all Website activity over the past 30 days for a manufacturer of welding studs and stud welding machines.

Most people don’t really know what all this reporting means.  BUT, we see numbers and we are comfortable with numbers so we place value on what we see because 10 is more than 1 and 1,000 is more than 100.  It’s easy to see the sources of Website traffic and say Google is responsible for all leads for this company because it generates 75% of the activity….thus 75% of the leads, right?

The day before I met with this client they got a lead for 300,000 welding studs for Ford Motor Co. We want to use Webtrax to identify where that lead came from.

Let’s look even deeper at the actual user sessions to see if we find “Ford Motor Co.” as a visitor to the Website.  Notice Ford Motor Co is not one of the names listed, but let’s not fall into the trap of assuming the lead came from Google just because Google = 75% of activity.

 Measuring ROI

Marketing stats and conventional wisdom would give Google the credit for the order. But, the reality is that the quote came from a company that found them on ThomasNet and only spent 31 seconds on their Website!

NOTE: The only reason we flushed this out is because I happened to meet with this client the day after the lead came in and we were reviewing the Web results.

There are 2 takeaways from this exercise:

1. You can’t rely on raw numbers when making marketing decisions.  Marketing 101 says that you win business opportunities when you position your company in the places where buyers search for your products.  BE WHERE THE BUYERS ARE.
2. You must actively track your leads in order to determine your ROI.  Don’t rely only on numbers, ask people how they found you, work backwards from leads to the source.

You can’t afford to miss sales opportunities—the last thing you can afford to do is take yourself out of the places that are generating sales in your industry!

Do you want people calling you out of the blue for 300,000 piece orders?! 

Can you afford to miss these sales?!

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