By Scott Nichols

I hope this busy season is going well for you. It’s the time of year to build your customer base so we can sell products and services to more customers. It’s the time of year to build your EFT business with the hope you sell more than last year and the hope of all your EFT members stay with you throughout the year. For most, this is the time of the year where you are ramping up your marketing to gain new customers and bring previous customers back to visit you again. Today, I want to talk to you about the importance of your marketing and how to do it effectively – to do it in a way that will save you time and help maximize the money you spend each month.

Marketing is one of the major parts of your business you should pay attention to. It’s the part that if done correctly can create your best months and if done poorly can have a negative impact on your business. Marketing can be challenging because there isn’t an exact science to it. If there was, all we would need to do is follow the formula and, “poof,” our marketing would be done.

So where do you start? Some, if not most, of your marketing answers can be found in your past. The past can tell you what has worked and what hasn’t. There isn’t an exact science to it, but there is some math involved. We know how to figure out your sales average, lotion average and many other averages. The same can be done with your marketing. I have three areas you should follow to make sure your marketing is working.

Before I get to the three areas, go through what you did for marketing for the past year and break it down per month. Next, find all the social media posts, emails, text messages, radio and TV spots, outdoor print, new uniforms and whatever else you have done. Take an excel spreadsheet and make a column with all the different services you offer. Some of these services might be UV tanning, sunless tanning, SmartSun Therapy and more. Along the side (Under Column A), list all the different services you did throughout the year. Copy this 12 times to represent 12 months. If you did radio in January and ran a sunless commercial, put the dollar amount under Sunless and Radio. If you have done social media posts on UV tanning and there is no cost, then make sure you still acknowledge you did it and put zero in the box. If you right-click on the box, you can add notes. Use these notes to give more information such as the number of posts you did and a quick description of the post. Maybe it was specials you were running or you posted about a new bed. Also, note what all the specials were with the other forms of advertising you did. If you ran radio spots, make sure you note what specials you ran.

I’ve found there are three important areas you can keep track of when looking at how successful your marketing is.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.