Understand your Marketing Key Metrics
What Key Metrics can I influence with my marketing activities?
Unless you are working in a gang of desperados robbing banks and stagecoaches, it is proven that “Give me your money now!” has never been a very successful sales pitch.
What that means is that your marketing activities should aim at influencing people into doing things that will in turn generate revenue. In other words: Revenue is a byproduct of the customer actions that you can influence.
Here is what I discovered when I was managing a Taco stand in Tijuana:
Let’s imagine that you are outside a Sharkira concert and that out of the 54 other Taco stands usually around the venue, one is home sick after having eaten one of his leftover tacos and 53 happen to have been sabotaged while you were visiting your Madre in Rosarito (as she will confirm), making you the only taco stand left outside. Provided that you can’t have your pistola on you because you are on libertad conditional, then what are your options to make as mucho dinero as possible?
- Monopoly: Being the only taco stand outside the venue, you can up your prices by 50% and the hordes of adolescentes will still swarm your place for lack of competition. This is a very easy way to increase your revenue, however it requires a special situation that is very rare on the market (and requires a strong alliby)
- Upsell: Now that you have mucho clientes lining up in front of your stand, you can apply a well proven marketing strategy: upsell them. Let’s say you sell your tacos for 50 pesos and your burritos for 120 pesos. Try to use your badass marketing skills to upsell tacos buyers into buying burritos. The easiest way is to achieve this would be to sell packages to hungry families. Say for example, instead of selling 4 tacos to a group of 4 for a total of 200 pesos, you offer a “Waka Waka” family pack for 300 pesos with 2 burritos and 2 tacos, by cutting your profit on that sale by 40 pesos and thanks to your amazing marketing skills when naming your packaged offer, you just increased your sales by 50% (and the burritos are from the day before anyway).
- Customer retention: Now that thousands of people just turned into customers and knowing that the Madre told you it was the last time she would lie for you. It is time to make sure that next time, when there will be 55 taco stands outside the venue, those that ate at your taco stand (and didn’t die of food poisoning) will naturally come back to you. There are many ways to approach this, you could for example offer a points card (10 tacos bought, you get one free) or, if you asked the clientes for their email address, you could send an email before the next Ricky Martin concert telling them where your stand will be, and to bring a print of the email for 10% off.
All in all, using marketing tactics to build a strong customer base is key to build a successful business and increase your ROI.
As el Padre once told me outside the Catedral de Señora de Guadalupe the most important in life and in Marketing is to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, to have the courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. I miss el Padre.
Tags: Marketing Metrics Services