2 simple questions that can rate a businesses online marketing

This is stupid simple yet in my experience 95% of real offline businesses that make a huge sum of their sales or could make a huge sum from the Internet do NOT pass this simple test of two questions.

This leads me to state time and again we are STILL in the days of the wild wild west online and that it is almost impossible for someone that takes the time to make a company pass this test fail at making them a ton more profits.

I have been marketing every type of offline business (local, national, international) for almost 17 years. Small budget to 6 figure. The tools get more complicated. Some are very advanced in tools, places they advertise, big budgets, keep redeveloping their sites etc..

Everybody gets lost in the complexity and the technology and loses site of the big picture. It’s like wanting to trim the waste line, inventing/investigating exercise equipment and science for months when all you had to do was take a 30 minute walk every day after supper to achieve your desired result or eat an apple instead of a bucket of chicken (sorry Claude I know you love chicken).

So what simple 2 questions does pretty much EVERY client I have ever talked to fail at being able to answer or what are they not doing?

Here they are:

1. #1 Exactly what is the dollar value of a visitor to your site?
2. #2 Are your ads and the landing pages on your site ALWAYS in a state of and A/B split test with proper tracking in place so you can never stop improving conversions.

Now #1 causes dead silence then the guessing starts.

I will admit that this can be complicated as hell to figure out for some businesses BUT by god it would be time MUCH better spent than all the other stuff they are desperately doing. It’s like not even knowing why you’re in business.

“ Hey let’s spend $100 to get a customer... How much does a customer make us... Hmm I dunno...” See the problem.

Equally interesting and a bit of a sub topic is that even companies that spent the time and thought they knew were often very very wrong. You can go deep with this stuff. Life time value, referral value, social proof value, brand value, re-activation value, critical mass/scale value...

#2 This one makes me do a face palm. I repeatedly see businesses whose very survival is dependent on online conversions and they are NOT split testing. They spend their days hunting keywords, playing with budgets, trying to refine audiences, always looking for BETTER traffic and MORE traffic.

It does not occur to them that just as or more important than better traffic, they need a better offer and better conversions! AND that that better offer will NEVER stop evolving. If you stop evolving some competitor will come along and turn your “good enough” offer into one that starts to lose you money.

Of course the bright side is thanks to #1 you can go on living in a happy state even when you are losing money because you don’t know your numbers anyway.

This is some very simple food for thought. Working on these two things alone makes me seem like a genius to my clients over and over again. Anybody that really knows me knows I am not that clever, just a Canadian living in an igloo :-)

Many of you here probably have a few simple questions like this that you look at quickly to assess the state of a companies marketing. They are endless but if you have some gems I would love to hear them.

I like these because they are simple and universal no matter the channel. Know your numbers and test. Simple but not happening much these days in real offline businesses. Sometimes happens for a while then laziness sets in. Shocking is how complex the OTHER things they are doing.