Knowing if your marketing is working is a common worry, whether you’ve hired an agency or decided to do it yourself you need to see that you’re getting more money back from your marketing than you’re investing.
You might be used to traditional marketing where you advertise to anyone no matter how relevant they are and it’s often difficult to know whether people have seen / paid attention to your adverts.
Digital marketing is another story entirely, the internet offers countless opportunities for getting your message to the right people and knowing whether they’re paying attention to what you’re putting out there.
There are 3 steps to knowing that your marketing is working:
Step 1: knowing what you want to measure
Step 2: actually measuring it
Step 3: checking that what you’re spending is worth what you’re getting out of it.
It’s that simple.
I’ve expanded on these points below renaming them Objectives, Tracking Conversions, and Checking Success.
Step 1: Objectives
At the start of any marketing campaign you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish with the campaign.
This is where goal setting comes in, common goals for your marketing could be:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase sales
- Launch a new product or offer
Once you’ve chosen your objectives you need to set KPI’s to track the success of these. Common KPI’s that you might choose for each of these are:
- Advert impressions (the number of times an advert has been shown)
- Sales enquiries
- Visits to a page about your new product / offer
There are a number of ways that you can track these KPI’s, Google Analytics is by far the most popular, and it’s free. There are alternatives, but that’s not for this article.
Step 2: Tracking Conversions
Now that you know what you want to measure, it’s time to start measuring it. This is where conversions come in. For those of you not familiar with conversions, they are basically any action that you want a visitor on your website to perform, these will be determined by your objectives.
One of your objectives is likely to be ‘to increase the amount of people requesting a storage quote’; in this case, a conversion would be someone filling out a quote form on your site.
For example, on our website we’d love you to read our free guide on how to sell more storage, or get in touch with us. Either of those actions counts as a conversion for us, and the higher the proportion of people who do that the more value we know our marketing is adding.
There are loads of ways to track conversions, you can track people who come to your site and then call you, you can track people filling out contact forms, and more importantly you can track which marketing channel sends you the most conversions.
Which leads on to…
Step 3: Checking Success
Now you’re tracking conversions you need to know how much each one is worth to you, and how much you are spending per conversion.
If you know that about 80% of people who fill in your quick quote form will become a customer, and the average lifetime value of a customer is £1000 then one quick quote conversion is worth £800 to you.
This is how you know your marketing is working, if you are spending more to get a customer than they are worth to you, then your marketing isn’t working
Which is why it’s important not to waste your marketing spend advertising to everyone, as the chances are you’ll be spending more to get a customer than that customer will pay you.
