Marketing is one of those things that most business owners know they need to do, and they might even know what good marketing looks like, but a lot aren’t really sure how it’s all measured. And so they keep doing what they’re doing, with no real idea of if it’s working or not, and if it’s generating them a profit, or if it’s actually making them a loss. As a result, many businesses still don’t understand how to really maximise the value of their marketing, or even how to use it effectively at all. And if they do, only a small percentage are actively testing and measuring the success of their marketing campaigns, then using that knowledge to improve their strategies. We think this a crying shame. So we’re going to share a few ways you can measure the success of your marketing efforts, and work out just how effective your strategy is.
Why Measuring the success of your Marketing Is Essential?
Before you can possibly say if your marketing is successful or not, you need to know what success looks like for you. This is important, as a success for one business isn’t necessarily the same thing as a success for another. So ask yourself, what are you trying to achieve through your marketing? Are you looking for more new enquiries from your website? Do you want more people to see your Facebook posts, or maybe an increase in bookings for your next event. These measures might change depending on the current aims of your business over time, but that’s ok! That’s the beautiful thing about marketing. If you decide to change your focus, then you can change what you’re measuring to match it.
By choosing key metrics to measure, you can gather real, tangible data on the effectiveness of each campaign or marketing strategy. This data can tell you which channels provide the highest ROI for you, highlight where your biggest spend is, allow you to hone in on the best marketing channels for your business. Ultimately, that data helps you make better decisions for your business and fuel growth through effective marketing.
But the question then becomes, what do you measure, and when?
The What and When
There are a lot of different things you can measure when it comes to marketing, so choosing the right metrics to track will depend on what your ultimate goals are. But to start you off, some of the metrics you can track include:
- Funnel conversion rates
- Customer engagement
- Marketing spend per customer
- Delivery and open rates for email marketing
- Page impressions – how many people have seen your pages?
- Followers
- Click-through rate
- Bounce rate
These are just a few of the metrics you could choose. Now, you shouldn’t measure everything at once – instead, choose your metrics based on your goals and the information you need, and set up regular measurement.
How often you measure your metrics again depends on which metrics you choose, and what your overall goals are. Some metrics, like visits, number of leads and lead visits per channel, should be checks on daily so that you can keep track of warm leads and take action. Other metrics, like campaign downloads, inbound links and click-through rate can be measured weekly, while some, like SEO rank, cost per lead and email clickthrough rate should be measured just once a month.
Analytics Are Everywhere
Whenever we come across someone who says they can’t measure their marketing, we are baffled. Because there are literally thousands of ways you could be measuring your marketing, thanks to the world of digital marketing. Pretty much every social media and marketing platform now comes with a built-in analytics tool, designed to help you see the benefits you’re getting and how well your marketing is performing. All you need to do is use them!
Tips For Measuring Offline Marketing
Traditional ‘offline’ marketing is one of those areas that a lot of business owners say ‘well, we can’t really measure it, but we do it anyway’. Well, we’re going to call you on that. Because even if you don’t have the fancy analytics and automatic tracking, there are ways you can assess the effectiveness of analogue marketing. For example, you can:
Use branded links
A lot of businesses will just share their main domain link on all of the marketing materials. But instead, try creating unique landing pages for each of your campaigns, locations or marketing methods, and use a unique link for each of them. For example, you could use mybrand.link/mag for a magazine advert, or mybrand.link/oxford for a campaign in Oxford. It’s more memorable for the people seeing your marketing, and it means that when they do visit your website, you know where they came from.
Call Tracking Links
Not everyone who sees your offline marketing will want to engage with you online. Plenty of people prefer speaking on the phone, or by other methods. But how do you tell if a customer is calling you because they’ve seen your posters, or because they read your magazine ad? Call tracking numbers are perfect for this. They are essentially the telephone equivalent of a custom landing page. Instead of your normal business phone number, you can use a service that allows you to choose different phone numbers for different campaigns and redirect them to your standard number. This way, you can tell exactly where the phone call came from based on which number they called. Neat, huh?
Discount Codes
Everyone loves a discount. And one of the best things about them from a business point of view is that they are unique. So they incentivise people to engage with your business, and help you track where they came from at the same time. Just issue slightly different discount codes to each of your marketing channels, and when they are used, you can see where they came from, and measure the volume from there.
A great man once said ‘half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half.’ And for a lot of business owners, this is absolutely true. But it doesn’t have to be.
Tracking and measuring your marketing efforts is actually a simple thing, it just takes a small amount of effort and know-how. And by measuring how well each activity is performing, you can funnel your time, money and energy into the options that are bringing you a good return, and spend less time on things that aren’t generating leads for your business. If you’d like to find out more about how to measure your marketing, or how to build a marketing machine all your own, just get in touch with us today.
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