Why Small Business Saturday isn’t over just yet for your small business

Small Business Saturday may have come and gone, but it’s not quite over for you. If you’ve moved on, STOP!

You still need to work out how well your offer did. Many small business owners I know often miss this step. Whether you achieved your goal or missed it, this last step is vital to ensure your time and money is spent wisely on future marketing activities.

Revisit your goal

Remember when you were setting up your offer, I told you that you needed a quantifiable goal? This was to give you a target to aim for, but also to help you understand, at the end of your campaign, whether you achieved it. So, the first thing you need to do is check how you did against your goal. Here’s a reminder of some goals you might have used:

Bring in 20 new customers.
Increase sales by 20%.
Increase repeat business by 15%
20 attendees at networking event

Now, whether you hit your target, exceeded it or fell short, you need to know why so you can understand what worked and what you need to fix. This will help you to repeat the success you had or help you reach your target next time. To do this you need to look at all the marketing activities you did and figure out how well they worked.

If you followed my 3-step plan, you will have used email marketing and social media to promote your offer. Now is the time to look back at these and measure how they did. So, let’s go through how to do this.

Newsletters

If you used an email tool (like Constant Contact), and you should be, then now’s the time to start going over your reports. Here’s what you need to do:

Look at all the open rates. This is how many people opened your emails, which will tell you which of your emails was the most popular. Why do you need to know this? Well, when you know which email was opened the most, it tells you which subject line worked. That, in turn, tells you the type of subject lines you should use in future emails, so they are opened.

Pro tip: there’s a reason you should care about the subject line. It’s called the 222 rule, and it’s going to help you write great subject lines.

You have 2 seconds to make an impact to make sure your reader reads the first 2 words of your subject line and carry on reading the rest, so they open your email (2)today.

Check your click rates. This is how many people clicked on the links you included in your emails, which will tell you what your readers liked reading about the most. Why do you need to know this? Understanding what your readers like will help you give them more of that content. The more content they get that they like reading, the more engaged they will be with your newsletter.

Pro tip: keep a list of the types of content that go down well with your readers and recycle them into blog posts, infographics, video tips or other formats.

Social media

Most social media platforms have built-in analytics tools. These are good enough to help you understand the impact of your social media efforts. Look at all your posts on your social media channels. Again, you’re looking for the best-performing ones. Which ones got the most likes, shares or comments? What’s this going to tell you? Actually, it’s two things. The first is the content that performed the best. The second thing is the post format that performed the best – was it an image, a video or a word-only post?

Pro tip: pay attention to the ‘reach’ figure in your analytics. This tells you which posts have been seen by your fans’ wider networks.

Now that you have the above information, you can look at what led people to take up your offer. Which email led to a purchase? Which Facebook post led to an event registration? Each metric will help you understand the bits of your campaign that led a person to action and helped you achieve your target. It will also show you what didn’t work as well so you can figure out how to change it or decide not to do it again.

Remember, this last step is important and will help you improve your future campaigns, so don’t skip it!

Ready to make your mark?

If you’re not sure where to start, create an irresistible offer with my new eBook. At only £9.99, it’s the recipe you need for a stellar Small Business Saturday offer.

Here’s the BIG plus. You can use the process at any time of the year. Buy once and use it again, and again! Get your copy today.