Benchmarks
With the recession my business has slowed down, a lot. I am now 55% below February 2008. My 2 largest customers have closed. I am reexamining my marketing. Before I spend more money on marketing, I need to figure out:
- Where do my customers find me? Ads, word of mouth, Google? I started phoning my old customers to ask. Guess what? From that I already have 2 small photo shoots! That wasn't the purpose, the purpose is to find where I should spend my time and work on my marketing.
- What's my percentage of people, who call/email with questions, becomes customer?
- What's my percentage of people, who ask for a meeting/proposal, becomes customer?
- What's the average long-term value of each customer?
- How much am I spending to bring in each new customer?
I am going through my records trying to figure this out. This is very good information, not just for now but also for after the recession.
- Just phoning old customers for a survey and I was able to create work.
- These 2 photo shoots will happen only because I phoned and gave them the idea of the photo shoots.
- I didn't take the photo shoots away from any another photographer.