Weight Watchers for Your Marketing
As much as I hate to admit it, I recently joined Weight Watchers. While business has been growing like crazy so has my waistline. My usual weight loss techniques weren’t working so I decided to give Weight Watchers a try. While I was setting up my profile, I marveled at the ease of the points plan. It is all a simple math equation. The food I eat is weighed by its nutritional content and assigned a point value. If I stay within my total for the week I lose weight.
My new diet program got me thinking—can I apply this tracking system to marketing? The concepts are basically the same—you input your behavior, which is weighted according to certain factors and then assigned a value. The only difference is that with marketing you really want more not less. But for most businesses I know there is a baseline. If you fall under X points then your business just won’t succeed.
The key to this system is figuring out:
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What to track?
In a nutshell, anything you do to promote your business is marketing and should be tracked. This includes advertisements like direct and print or TV ads; in-person networking; and online marketing like blogging, social media, and your website.
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How to weight it.
Some activities are more effective than others. This will be different for every business but overall in-person networking and online marketing is much more effective right now than traditional advertising.
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Your baseline.
How much marketing do you need to keep the doors open? This ties in nicely with the financial concept of the break even point—just how much revenue do you need to meet your bills.
I really like this idea and think it could be a powerful tool if developed into a formula. For example, if networking gets 3 points and you go to an event once per week then you get 12 points for the month. If your baseline is 25 points then you have better be doing something else—maybe a little Twitter or Facebook for 2 points. Then keep adding until you reach 25.
What do you think? What’s your baseline?
BTW, the Weight Watcher’s point thing totally works. I lost 1lb my first week!
