Whether you’ve just started marketing initiatives or have had marketing for your business running for years, marketing without analysis is—at best—guesswork and, at worst, throwing good money after bad. It’s why marketing agencies can deliver where an owner’s attempted marketing fails, and why the expertise to read and understand marketing data is as important as the marketing itself. Today, we’ll go over how to know if your marketing is actually working and what to do if it’s not.
Track Your Lead Generation
When building your marketing strategy, setting goals that you can track is a vital part of measuring success. For most businesses, this will be tracking lead generation—how users who found you through marketing ended up creating a sales lead, be that a phone call, a social media message, a form fill-out, or a direct purchase.
- Add Queries to Your Forms: For many businesses, especially service-based ones, forms submitted on their websites will be a major source of leads. Make sure to include a required field on how they found out about your products or services to track marketing.
- Goal & Conversion Tracking: Platforms like Google Analytics and Google Ads have systems that can track users from traffic sources to ad clicks and end with forms, phone calls, or other sales leads. But these goals and conversions need to be set up first.
- Loop in Your Sales Team: If you’ve got both a marketing team (or an outsourced agency) and a sales team, it’s vital that they talk. Making sure the sales team is aware of lead generation and asking customers about marketing they may have seen is essential.
Marketing Analytics: Which Metrics Matter?
Beyond looking at your leads, it’s important to look at other data that can provide useful, if not always concrete, analysis for your marketing endeavors. Learning how to use Google Analytics is essential for understanding how traffic reaches your website and what it does once it gets there. Much of the time, you’ll be able to get a snapshot of your marketing by using KPIs, but it’s also important not to obsess over just a single one.
Reviewing Your Data: The Time It Takes
Lastly, it’s important to talk about what time frames you should be reviewing your marketing to know if it’s working or not. Below are some quick rules of thumb to start with:
- Paid Ads = Short Term Analytics: Because of the large amounts of money and quick results paid ads bring, review windows should be short, starting just days after it’s turned on, and then month to month for maintenance and tweaking.
- Active Marketing = Medium Term Analytics: For active marketing like social media, email marketing, and other outbound marketing, it’s important to step back and look at month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter to better see the impact.
- Organic Marketing = Long Term Analytics: The hard truth is that much of your marketing endeavors take time to build up, on a year-to-year cycle. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work, such as blogs, backlinks via social media, and “going viral” all take time and a little luck.
Having trouble letting your marketing run long enough? Read our blog, Dealing with Confirmation Bias in Marketing & Advertising.
Knowledge, goal-setting, and patience are all vital to making better marketing decisions that drive business growth. If you’re having trouble, it’s time to contact Vision. We’re here to plan and execute strategies that meet your needs and budget, from email marketing and social media to website design. Also check out the rest of our Vision blogs, our enVisioning Success podcast, and our downloadable Marketing Strategies Playbook.
