Do you measure effectiveness of your marketing? It’s a cliché: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” But clichés are clichés for a reason. And the reason is more often than not because they are true.
- How do you know whether something is working or whether it’s not?
- Can you afford to waste time on something that it isn’t working?
- Can you afford to waste money on something that isn’t working?
- Is there any reason to be doing things that aren’t working for you?
First of all, every time you do a specific marketing activity or put something in place like when you set up a Facebook page, do a Google AdWords campaign, put an ad in the paper or whatever you are doing, always think about why you’re doing it. What do you want that specific marketing activity to achieve?
Think about the Marketing Process – you can read all about that here. Are you doing this for awareness, to gain interest, build likeability and/or trust, give people a taste of what you offer, to push for the sale, get more sales from your existing customers or get your customers to let others know about you? What is the role of this particular activity. What do you want it to do? How do you want this marketing activity to lead people to the next phase of the process? And then think about how you can measure whether the activity is doing what you want it to do.
This calls for a cohesive marketing system where your activities are playing in sync, like the instruments of a symphony, supporting each other.
Here are some examples of things you may want your marketing activities to achieve and how you could measure your marketing effectiveness:
- What do you want people to do when they see your Facebook ad? Do you want them to click through to sign-up for your email list? – use the conversion pixel to measure how many people sign up.
- Do you want to increase website traffic by driving people from twitter to your site? Use Hootsuite for your tweets and they will track the clicks on the link – and then Google Analytics on your webpage to see how much traffic you are getting from twitter and whether your efforts are increasing it.
- If you sell directly through your website, are you actually selling? How many people are coming to a particular page and out of those, how many actually end up buying? If you get lots of traffic but no sales, you know that the problem is most likely with the sales page, so how can you improve that to convert better?
There are lots of things that you can be checking. If you know exactly what results you want to achieve with what you are doing, it makes it easier to determine how to measure whether you are getting them.
Do fewer things and make sure they are working rather than doing lots of things and not having a clue about what they are doing for you!
How can you measure the effectiveness of the things you are doing in your marketing? It’s a challenge and it’s hard work, but would you rather be running like a hamster in a wheel, wasting your time, efforts and money, with nothing to show for it?