6 Step System to Improve Your Marketing as a Small Business that Bids

If your business offers services that require you to give out bids or estimates to customers, there is one thing you can do to dramatically improve your marketing. By setting up a system where you are measuring not just how many requests you get, but measure how many quotes you gave and the dollar amount of those quotes, you will improve your marketing as a small business.

While this is just one step in the right direction in an inbound marketing strategy, this one thing alone can improve the quality of your marketing, strategy and decision making. But don’t worry, there are several steps that we will go over to help you get there!

Why is it important to measure the amount of quotes you give and the value of the bid?

1. You are going to use it to compare to other numbers like gross and net revenue
2. You are going to evaluate year after year and ask how efficient are we in giving quotes? [you start to see what your closure rate is]
3. Great place to evaluate your pricing
4. Shows the effectiveness of your marketing efforts

It’s important to not only look at sales or just your profit as a small business. The way to see if your marketing truly works is to compare the work you are doing with the work you are bidding.

For example, with one of our clients it has been more difficult to evaluate marketing success over the years because they don’t have a system to report their bids. With the same amount of time and budget their marketing strategy could be more effective if we had those numbers to direct adjustments to their marketing strategy as time goes on.

So, how can you actually start doing this and implementing it in your business?

1. Acknowledge that it’s important
2. Examine your current process and evaluate how you can measure it
3. Set up a system to track bids given, bids won and the dollar value of all
4. Go back and see if you can pull any old data out of your archives  so that you can find trends
5. Begin tracking data from here forward [might be a new software, excel sheet, or you already have something in your current software that does this for you etc.]
6. Schedule time [preferably monthly] to evaluate data. Look for trends, see what they are telling you.

Not knowing in a business is stressful, especially if you’re trying to guess in a lot of things. Every time you can track measurable actions and set goals based on those actions you can actually see results. Isn’t it nice when you can see actual results, numbers and data? When you are measuring actionable KPI’s it’s far less stressful to make informed decisions. You are no longer in the dark.

It is easy to get distracted and pulled away by other things in your business. Not keeping track of your bids can be overlooked easily, but shouldn’t. If you want to be able to measure your efforts more accurately and have a marketing strategy that works, you need to do this.

If you want to begin measuring these metrics and have a more successful small business, we can help with inbound marketing. Contact us today!

Since 2002, Half a Bubble Out has been dedicated to providing marketing, advertising and small business consulting that meet the needs of our clients. We specialize in powerfully telling stories through inbound marketing to grow your business filled with more passion and provision. Based in Chico California, we serve clients throughout Northern California and across the country to New York.