Small business failure rate is high. Some new businesses will grow into larger enterprises, but many will fail. According to this article from Forbes, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start a business fail within the first 18 months.
Some businesses fail because they have a product or service that the market did not want. Many businesses with great products or services end up failing because of marketing failure. Business owners end up wasting their money on ineffective marketing strategies. Instead of generating enough profits to grow their business, they ended up running out of money.
Marketing failure can happen for different reasons. Some entrepreneurs are not doing enough marketing for their business; others are doing too many ineffective strategies.
The #1 killer reason for marketing failure is not knowing which strategies are working and which ones are losers. Instead of focusing only on profitable marketing strategies, entrepreneurs continue losing campaigns that are wasting precious resources.
How Do You Fix the #1 Cause of High Small Business Failure Rate?
You can apply the 80/20 rule to your marketing plan and track your results. By taking massive action on 20% of marketing strategies that can generate 80% of your results, you can focus on the best use of your time and money. You can work less and earn more.
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity.
Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. ~Steve Jobs
Building an integrated marketing strategy is the most powerful way to attract your customers and generate revenue as well as build brand awareness. You can use different promotional methods for targeting your prospects mobile, online and offline. You can build an effective marketing plan using different techniques, such as, advertising, email marketing, public relations, social media marketing, direct marketing.
Millions of small businesses fail worldwide because entrepreneurs don’t take the time to develop an effective marketing plan and track their results.
Many new marketers and entrepreneurs (often called newbies) build a website and they assume that they are “marketing online” with their website. They wait for traffic to come automatically — and for most newbies, money-making traffic never comes. Sadly, this leads to a failed business.
Other newbies use too many marketing strategies. Instead of focusing on few strategies that really work, they end up doing too many marketing activities that are not very effective. They end up working too hard and spending too much money because they’re using too many ineffective marketing strategies. Unfortunately, this also leads to a failed business.
How Do You Avoid the High Business Failure Rate? You Need to Track and Analyze Which Marketing Strategies Are Working for You
Just focus on the top marketing strategies that work for your small business. Your marketing results are easy to track and analyze online. You need to limit yourself to the most essential marketing activities that can help build your small business.
How do you know which marketing strategies are working for you? By tracking and analyzing your traffic and sales.
Even if you’re not bringing in massive amounts of traffic yet, you may start seeing a trickle of sales. As you start getting more traffic and sales, you will know which marketing strategies deserve most of your time, money and energy.
If you’re just starting out, you can just focus on ONE marketing strategy. Which one? The one that brings in the most profit. Traffic and sales are good, but profit and return on your investment (ROI) are far more important.
The simplest way to track which marketing strategy really works for you is to use a tracking software. You can use free analytics from Google to analyze data from your website and figure out what’s working.
Tracking Tools That Can Help You Analyze Sales and Conversions
1) ClickMagick offers EFFORTLESS tracking of ANY action, conversion or sale. You can easily track entire sales funnels.
ClickMagick is 100% web-based with nothing to install. So, you don’t have to deal with the hassles and additional cost of hosting your own tracking software.
This offers a big advantage over Prosper202, a self-hosted tracking software, which can be slow unless you’re paying for a fast and costly virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server.
Studies have shown that every ONE second delay in page load times results in lost clicks and a 7% conversion DECREASE.
Since web-based ClickMagick lives “in the cloud” — this results in lightning-fast click processing that can make you more money. Click HERE now to start your 14-day FREE trial.
2) Prosper202 is a popular tracking software used by many marketers. It works very well and it’s free.
UPDATE 8-4-21:
The old links for Prosper202 are no longer working. If you’re still using Prosper202, here’s the link for upgrading your software. It also includes a text-based tutorial to help you learn how to track which marketing campaigns are profitable and which one are losers.
If you’re a complete newbie, it might take you a little bit of time to figure out how to set up tracking for your marketing campaigns. But, it’s worth taking the time to learn how to use it. It’s simple once you learn how to do it.
If you’re doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other paid marketing platforms, you can also set-up free cookie-based tracking of your sales and conversions. You can usually get detailed instructions and tutorials on how to use the tracking code from your PPC advertising platform.
Most marketers prefer to use an additional tracking tool, like ClickMagick, because you can get more details about what strategies are working for you. For example, your campaign may only be profitable on certain days and hours as well as cities; so, you need to turn off your advertising on days, hours and cities that your campaign is losing money.
You need to analyze your tracking data to figure out how to minimize your cost and maximize your profits.
You’ve probably heard this famous quote about advertising:
I know half my advertising is wasted… I just don’t know which half.
~ John Wanamaker, a 19th century US store merchant considered to be the father of modern advertising
How much money are you just wasting because you don’t know how
to track your losses and eliminate them? By tracking your marketing campaigns, you can eliminate your losers and scale up your winners:
- You can stop using marketing strategies that are losing money.
- You can stop trying to sell products and services that do not lead to sales. Instead, find offers that convert easily and focus only on those money-making offers.
- You can scale up and maximize your income. You can increase time, money and effort on money-making offers and marketing strategies that make the most money for you.
By using a good tracking system, you can earn quadruple the income or even more from the same traffic.
Your path to success is going to be unique to your own circumstances. It will depend on your combination of talents, skills and experiences as well as the amount of time, money and resources you have available.
It’s very hard to predict which strategies will generate the best results for you. So, it’s absolutely critical that you test and track marketing or money-making strategies that you decide to use.
Without using a good tracking system, you will not know exactly what is working effectively for you. You will end up wasting a lot of your time and money on offers and strategies that will never succeed. You can end up losing a lot of money and depleting all your financial resources before you can succeed.
Having a good tracking system can help you focus only on the highest-paying strategies. You can save time and money — and maximize your income. You can work less and earn more.
By applying the 80/20 rule to your marketing plan, you can focus on the most essential and profitable activities. You can avoid the #1 killer reason for the high small business failure rate.
You can avoid wasting a lot of money and depleting all your financial resources before you can succeed. Instead, you only need to focus on the few marketing strategies that can catapult your business to success.
