Who sent you?!

Austin: Who sent you?!

Mustafa: You’ll have to kill me.

Austin: Who sent you?!

Mustafa: Kiss my ass, Powers!

Austin: Who sent you?!

Mustafa: Dr. Evil!

Felicity: That was easy.

Austin: That was easy.

Felicity: Why did you tell us?

Mustafa: I can’t stand to be asked the same question 3 times. It just irritates me.

• Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me

Imagine you’re in a niche specialist shop.

The smell of the stationery. Downtempo electronica. Smiling bookish staff. Ambient lighting that draws me into discovering an item I want. I’m practically falling over myself to pay for the goods and the service assistant asks…

“How did you hear about us?”

You probably have moments like this too.

It’s no accident that thriving small businesses ask this question. They’re always looking for ways to learn more about their customers.

With your broad definition of what a channel is, you need to start identifying who is coming from them, who they are, whether they’re a good customer, and how you get more of them.

The goal is to make noticing this a lasting habit.

We covered one of the easiest ways to do this in the Understanding Your Customers - asking them!

This gets you started.

Set up regular opportunities to ask your customers face-to-face once you’re on your way.

Being online makes it easier to notice what is working and what isn’t.

Here are some ways to get started, and once we get to the Notice section you’ll dive deeper on how to track what is working most effectively.

1. Manually tracking your marketing activity.

We want to make notes of where you’ve been and what you did.

You might share a post in a community, write an article and be featured on a niche publication’s blog, or a family friend mentioned you on their social media and some orders came through.

You’re tracking activity.

Create a blank page, open up a spreadsheet, or fire up a note-taking app.

Include these bits of information:

• Date
• Where you were
• What you did
• A link (if possible)
• Notes on anything good (or challenging) that happened

This creates a bit of extra work at the start but does a lot of heavy lifting.

You’ll notice what is working the best after 10 attempts.

After 100 attempts you’ll notice what works better and what is a waste of time for your business.

1. Asking after a sale.

As soon as you’re able, ask someone how they heard about you. This is valuable data. It can be a manual chat, phone call, or email to begin with, and once things grow this process can be automated.

This practice is done at all levels.

Have you received score surveys once you buy from a big ecommerce site?

They’re called Net Promoter Scores (NPS). They give marketers a benchmark on how they’re performing. A good system escalates super-low scores to the relevant operations team, and a high score might lead to a prompt to refer a friend or write a review.

1. Track it with data.

I dropped the “D word” a few paragraphs ago. An abundance of data is one of the biggest advantages an online marketer has versus a traditional one. It’s a blessing and curse. I’ve seen many seasoned professionals lose sight of the big picture by focussing on tiny incremental things.

There’s a reason I’ve avoided using the word data. It’s jargon and can easily overwhelm someone outside of tech.

So far I’ve been sharing the underlying principles of marketing without complexity that’s going to continue but it’s time to think about data’s potential.

Ones of the easiest ways to see where sales are coming from is to make a specific offer in one channel.

Have you ever heard something like “Use the code PODCASTGUY to get a 20% discount off your next purchase?

The discount is customised to a channel, and helps a marketer determine where the most sales come from.

More advanced methods include link tracking (creating links specifically for each channel) and website analytics. We’ll look at these and more in the Notice section.

Your main takeaway is to find ways to continually ask “Who sent you!?” when you see traffic coming in and customers buying from you.

Just like Austin Powers.