Can you answer this question for your business?
What marketing worked for you in 2022?
The answer to this question comes down to tracking where every customer comes from. How do they find you?
I do this be asking every customer how they found me, and why they decided to use my services. I then put that information in notes. I use my QuickBook account and add it into the customer’s profile. You could use anything that goes with your business flow.
At the end of the year, I use excel to get the information into a form that is usable. It would be nice if QuickBooks would create these reports for me, but they do not. If you find a program that will let me know – excel is not the easiest program to use (for me).
Where did my customers come from in 2022?
What Marketing Worked?
Looking at this pie chart, one can see that 35% of my income came from the Internet category. This is search engine traffic. 29% came from Networking, either in-person or online networking. Further down in this blog post, I will break up this category to see what groups I need to concentrate on in 2023.
Referrals were 21% of my income, and this includes referrals from people I have met in the past and clients.
Repeat customers were 6%, Social Media 1%, and Speaking 8%.
I want to talk about the social media group. Although direct sales from social media were only 1% of my income, I will not be dropping social media. This type of marketing supports many of the other categories. Social media is a great way to get known before you are needed. This means it might be years before someone needs me, but they remember my name because I was visible. They may have searched my name and found me in the search engines. But they may not have remembered to look if they had not seen my social postings.
It is hard to quantify how much of an impact social media has on my annual income.
Which Networking Groups worked?
I built my business by networking and have been networking for 18 years. Not all groups are equal, and some networking groups do not produce business. Here is the breakdown of the groups I participated in during 2022.
Networking was 29% of my income for 2022. Here is the breakdown of the most productive groups.
- I Take The Lead (ITTL) is a group I have been a member of since 2006. It started as an in-person networking group in my local area, and during covid, they moved online. This is a group that I speak to regularly. This was the most productive group at 44% of my income last year.
- Womens Prosperity Network (WPN) is a wonderful group of women that offers education, coaching, and online networking. This group is coming in at 35%.
- All the rest of the networking groups listed here are groups that I no longer participate in, and they are all groups that I participated in weekly for many years but have not attended for at least three years. Networking is a form of marketing that keeps on paying, and you never know when a referral from a networking group will come into your business.
Conclusion
Looking at these charts, there is nothing that I am willing to give up in 2023. I will invest more money into search engine optimization to increase the Internet section of my business. In past years, it usually came in at 20%. Last year I invested in SEO and can see that investment has paid off, with 35% of my income from the internet. This is a worthwhile investment to carry into 2023.
Networking and referrals make up 50% of my income. Looking at the Networking chart, the two groups I am active in – WPN and ITTL are worth maintaining. I have already dropped the others, but they keep working for me.
I am currently analyzing how I spend my time each day and have discovered I am heavy on networking. I won’t be adding any more based on this information.
I enjoy speaking, so I will continue that marketing avenue and plan to grow it for 2023.
