Test and Measure your marketing activities

In our experience, anything that you measure usually improves. Therefore we recommend that you test and measure your marketing activities to better understand what works, what needs a tweak and what does not work, so should not be repeated.


Many of our prospect meetings for A1 Marketing identifies that many business owners simply do not know which part of their marketing is working and what is not. It is common for all marketing activities to be viewed as one and no measure of how a new customer specifically finds you.

We recommend to measure your marketing activity to the level that you can tell for each new customer or sale, which part of your marketing worked.

Once you know this, you can then start to test different variations of that activity and then gradually improve this even further until your marketing becomes even more powerful and profitable. So for example, your last batch of new customers came from your Google Adword campaign, but by testing different alternative messages do you gain even more enquiries?

We suggest that you try and use codes or references, utilise online analytics and try specific landing pages for any online activity to get much closer to measuring your activity.

As a must, you need to ask each new customer how they found you and why they brought from you, but please ensure your questions drill down to find the true reason which may be the first reason they were interested in you and not the 5th time they saw your last marketing message or what actually made them make the contact to purchase?

Payroll - Real Time Information

HMRC is introducing a new way of reporting PAYE - called Real Time Information, or RTI. From April 2013, employers will be legally required to report PAYE in real time. This means that information about all PAYE payments needs to be submitted to HMRC online each time a payment is made as part of the payroll process, rather than at the end of the year as they are now. For more information, please see www.hmrc.gov.uk/rti/index.htm as there are also some actions to get ready for the start date to ensure your employee records are up to date and accurate.

A true key business influencer

If referrals are a key part of our clients marketing strategy, then we ask them to focus on their key business influencers. These are not contacts in their network that are 'nice to know', but people who are 'advocates' of their business and are willing to influence the success of the business with referrals or recommendations.


Many clients have a long list of contacts in their network, usually with the hope of obtaining a referral, so one activity we recommend is to rate your contacts from 1 to 5, with the following scale:

1 - Nice to know and have in my network, but unlikely to refer in next 12 months

2 - Nice to know and possibly could refer in the next 12 months

3 - Good to know and may refer

4 - Great to know and is likely to refer with personal attention

5 - A 'KBI' who currently refers business.

If you can't score them, as not even nice to know, then remove them from you network! This simple exercise gives you focus for your limited resources. Diarise time to speak to and meet with your contacts rated 4 and 5.

It should also be your objective to move your contacts up the scale from 'nice to know' to 'referrer'. How you do this will be different for each individual, but a personal touch, knowing what is important to them and the application of focus will move your contacts closer to the desired 'KBI' status.