What’s your follow Through Plan?

on Jul 30 in marketing, tracking results, useful stuff

Having a follow through plan where you can track results is key to measuring success of any given campaign. It’s important to know how people are voting with their feet, mice and phones. Here are a few examples of ways you can track your audience’s response:

Unique URL or sub-directory or domain

This type of URL easier for people to remember and get information that ties in with the campaign at hand. Sometimes you will even see companies buy unique domain names that tie in with the campaign. This type of internet marketing reinforces a good message and when sprinkled with interactive and useful information—it can really impact your campaign’s effectiveness.

SMS marketing

People carry their phones with them the entirety of their day. Use this to bring and engage people together with SMS communication. Texts about upcoming events, promotions, news etc. The only drawback to this sort of marketing is that sometimes people do not have SMS message plans on their phone. www.messagebuzz.com and promo2cell.com are some direct fee based SMS marketing companies.

e-mail blast campaign

This type of follow through is sent directly to your potential or current client to something they check all the time, their e-mail. This offers a way to give at a glance information about what your company is offering in addition to reaching more eyes with the campaign that you have sent out that these people may not have seen yet. For those who have received the message you can use an e-mail blast several weeks later as a reminder and a reinforcement of that campaign-increasing top of mind and effectiveness. E-mail blasts have a very high open rate so even if you don’t get a response you’re at least engaging your audience. If you have not yet set up any e-mail campaigns you can look to mailchimp.com or constantcontact.com they are fairly easy to get moving on and have templates where you can plug in your information and mailing lists they even come with tracking.

Promo Code and Direct Mail Customization

Printers have caught on that tracking makes things more valuable. They have created entire systems that generate unique codes and even personalized content that can be targeted to individual mailing lists. People respond better to things with their names printed on. This gives an opportunity to personalize, track and target like never before with print. The web has been doing this for a while and the printing world has taken notice.

Create a worth-while Contest

Recently a very successful and viral contest was run by the state Queensland, Australia. They asked people all over the world to send youtube audition videos to have the dream job of island caretaker. This job was to promote tourism and show off the barrier reef to the world. They had a tremendous response.  They now have a blog and daily video footage promoting their natural beauty and someone has a really great job and a lot of fun doing it. www.islandreefjob.com.au

Coupons Gone Viral

People love to save money. There are tons of outlets where you can offer coupons to the public. Some of which are fee based some of which are free. Twitter and facebook contain a unique opportunity to distribute coupons to the people who are loyal enough to follow you or become a fan of your company or product. This gives you people who already love you and talk about you the ability to send your coupon to others. A viral success story. Creating a business page on Facebook is free so is twitter account. Low cost or no cost demand building cannot be beat.

google adwords

Their system is number one and the most powerful and comprehensive. You bid for position on the right hand side of the screen of search results. They also offer options that place your campaign on cooperating sites. This puts your company’s name, product, or service in front of the eyes of people right at the point in which they are searching for a solution to their problem. Plus, they can see it for free the only time that you as an advertiser would pay for it is if they click it. It’s a system that brings already interested parties to your site with very low overhead. They have a very sophisticated tracking and ranking system that generates reports to see how you are doing and cost analysis for your campaigns. It will even shuffle your campaigns so you can gauge their effectiveness.

google analytics

Now that people have started coming to your site you should have something in place to track where they are coming from and when. Another google free product does that. It created reports where you can view where people are coming from and where they are going and even how long they stick around on your site. This is valuable information. If you see a very important page is not getting enough hits you can reorganize your navigation or page layout so that you can funnel more traffic to that page.