It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it…

I hadn’t heard of the Bananarama Syndrome before today – I’d heard of Bananarama,  of course. Who could forget their efforts to ruin the fashion credibility of the entire teenage girl population of the early 80’s  – “For an early 80s Bananarama look, you don’t need to look like you’ve tried too hard! Just get hold of a stripy jumper or top, a hat and some pedal pushers or cropped jeans. Hair must be wild and messed up, make up bold”  sic angelfire.com/retro
I digress… Nigel Botterill and his Entrepreneurs Circle was the source of the remark that highlighted the aforementioned syndrome.
Discussing how to make 2011 the best business year ever for the Entrepreneur Circle members, he relayed the story of a business person who seemingly had all his marketing bases covered – social media, direct mail, email shots, vouchers, offers, advertising etc etc… and was doing okay, but the question he was asking himself (and Mr Botterill) was how he could take his business up a notch. How could he grow his profits and increase his customer base? However, when questioned on what worked best of all these marketing activities, he didn’t know…
The moral of the story? It’s all very well getting your ducks in a line and doing everything you know you should be, on the marketing front, but if you don’t know which of those things is having an effect, which is getting the results and bringing in the customers – you’re missing a trick. The answer to our friend’s question was that to grow his profits and his customer base he needed to do more of whatever was working at the moment – and to do that, you need to know what it is! Tracking by promotional codes, tracker telephone numbers, email responses, open and click through email rates, using Google Analytics to analyse your web traffic… the tools are all out there. You don’t need to be a banana!
How do you track and monitor your marketing efforts?