As a business owner, figuring out what parts of your marketing are and are not working may seem unwieldy. A marketing strategy can have many moving parts and for some, it’s easier to continually change your initial strategy instead of focusing on measuring outcomes and making small changes over time. 

If your company isn’t already measuring your marketing results, you need to start there. Marketing without data is like driving your car without a dashboard. It’s hard to determine which of your initial strategies are successful and which strategies need to be reevaluated.

We’ve outlined the key steps to help you determine if your marketing is working. 

Set Clear Objectives

Setting clear goals and objectives for your business will give you a clear path for determining ROI. For long-term goals and metrics, remember to report on data that includes the total cost of marketing efforts, revenue, and customer acquisitions. 

When setting your goals, it’s important to ask yourself and your team, “What is important?” You want to ensure each goal set is measurable and specific to your business. Being specific will allow you to utilize these goals as indicators to evaluate the status of your marketing throughout the year. 

You also need to set goals for each individual component of your marketing. For example, setting objectives for social media, website traffic, email campaigns, or direct mail will go a long way. 

Measure Results

Don’t make big marketing decisions based on personal feelings or shooting in the dark. Instead, use real data and metrics to stretch your marketing further! As a marketer, data is your friend, and it allows you to prove the value of your efforts for specific campaigns, while also providing you with the information needed to make key optimizations.

Website Analytics

For most businesses, your website is the first place consumers visit to find information about your business and your product/service. Your website should always be your top salesperson, but how can you ensure that your website is doing just that? Ask yourself these questions:

  1. Where is the majority of traffic to your website coming from?
  2. Does the content on your site answer the basic questions a new consumer may have? Is the content relevant to your business?  
  3. What percentage of that traffic is converting to a customer?

Social Media Analytics

Social media is the way of the world these days, so having a presence here is a must to help your business grow. Organic social is a free way to build a community of followers and share your brand’s message with them in an efficient way. Like everything in the world, social media does continuously evolve day by day, so how do you keep up with the times and evaluate which social platforms are working for your business? How do you prioritize the time spent?

  1. Checking your social media engagement month over month is a good start. Track the number of interactions on your social media channels. Measure your Facebook and Instagram likes and comments, retweets and replies on Twitter, comments on your blogs, and Youtube subscribers and interactions. 
  2. Setting up a GoogleAnalytics account to measure your website traffic from specific social media platforms is also a key component to measuring the success of your efforts, and can help you allocate time to which platforms are performing best. 

Get To Know Your Analytics Well

Now that you have your data squared away, let’s put it to good use. Revisiting your goals and using the data collected will help kick-start your evaluation, and help realign your efforts. Now you can make optimizations to your site, social media efforts, blog topics, and ad creative to give you the best results. You no longer have to rely on assumptions or guesswork (what a relief!), just let the data do the heavy lifting for you. 

Marketing is always recurrent, so measuring isn’t the final step, but rather just the beginning. Even though your strategy has lots of moving parts, breaking it down into individual components will make it easily digestible and easier to measure over time. Increasing your ROI will take some trial and error, but setting goals, measuring your data, and optimizing is the key to success!

The Gist

We know determining whether your ROI for your marketing efforts may seem unwieldy. A marketing strategy has many moving parts and for most, it’s easier to continually change your initial strategy instead of continuously measuring and making small changes over time. 

If your company isn’t already measuring its marketing results, you need to start there. Without evaluating its ROI, you can’t determine which of its initial strategies is successful and which needs to be reevaluated. Having a results-driven marketing partner like us is the second step to successful marketing. If you need more information on how to measure your marketing efforts, visit our digital marketing services page.