The Wax Blog

If you’re not familiar with it, the Intuit Small Business Blog is a great resource for small business owners looking for pragmatic advice on marketing, cash flow, employee management and other topics. Rachel Hartman interviewed me for a piece on measurement. Here’s a quick blurb, you can follow the link at the bottom to see the full article.

5 Ways to Make Sure Your Marketing Efforts Pay Off

by Rachel Hartmann

You’ve put in hours upon hours spreading the word about your product, but has all your hard work been worth it? Small businesses often commit one of two marketing blunders: They jump from one tactic to another, or they stick way too long to the “tried and true” ads, says Bonnie Harris, principal of Wax Marketing in St. Paul, Minn. Fortunately, you can gauge your success and resolve any problems by accurately measuring the results of your marketing efforts.

Harris offers these five tips for figuring out what’s working, what’s not, and where improvements need to be made:

For the rest of the piece, jump to the Intuit blog here. 

I have noticed that a lot of us are pretty polarized when it comes to our marketing efforts. We are way too impatient to see results from new marketing tactics, and often don’t measure the old ones effectively to make sure they’re still working.  As I mentioned a couple weeks back, you have to look back objectively at the past year before you can accurately plan for the next. To help you do that, I’ve created some questions to ask yourself about the sales and marketing you’ve done in 2011. (more…)

Wax Marketing mug to the first 5 who ID this photo

I got so many questions about my last post “7 Steps to Bigger Marketing Muscle in 2010″ I thought I’d give you some detail on each one of the steps.  Measurement seems to be really tricky for people – but it’s actually pretty simple. Once you have some basic measurements in place and you feel a need to go deeper, visit KD Paine’s measurement blog – she’s the real guru. I’d love to hear specific examples of how people are measuring their own results, so comment away! Here’s my quick and dirty take – (more…)