Knowing Your Numbers, The Key to Effective Marketing

By now, you know that being in business is all about knowing your numbers. How many sales you need to turn a profit. Or how many people you need to hire to cover the workload.  You can’t afford to guess because you know that the success or failure of your business depends on getting the numbers right.

And the same goes for your marketing. That is, if you want it to be effective.

Why Measure

It’s simple, really. You need to know what’s working and what’s not. Even free marketing costs. Wasting money, time, and effort on activities that don’t net a good return is a costly error, and not just financially. Let me explain.

Ineffective marketing trains your audience to ignore you. They become so used to getting the wrong messages from you that they start tuning you out.  And the tragedy is, if you were watching your numbers, you would have seen the signs early on and could have made changes, possibly saving the relationships.

Think of your numbers as your compass.

What To Measure

Look at your marketing plan. Now circle all the activities you’ll be doing over the next ninety days to get your message out there. That’s what you’re measuring.

For many small businesses, that will fall into three areas: website, email, and social media. And while there are so many tools out there to measure this activity, let’s stick to the basics.

Website

You need to know how many people are visiting your website, how they got there, what they’re doing when they get there, and how long they stay. This information and much more can be found by signing up for Google Analytics. While the level of detail available can be overwhelming, you can customize your reports to be as simple as you like.

Things to watch for: Web activity like number of visitors, clicks to specific content on your website, duration, and bounce rate

Email

Marketing automation has transformed our ability to keep track of various marketing activities all within one platform. But, not every small business is using it. They are using, however, platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact to reach out to their subscriber base. Both platforms provide detailed reporting on the performance of your email campaigns.

Things to watch for: Open and click through rates, bounces, unsubscribes, and who opened the email and what they clicked on

Social Media

Hootsuite and Buffer App enable you can manage all your social media accounts in one place, and track the results on your dashboard. But that’s not your only option.

Most social media platforms are equipped with their own reporting feature. Facebook has Insights and Twitter has Analytics. As does Pinterest. And LinkedIn keeps your stats right in front of you when you’re logged in.

Things to watch for: Total number of likes, tweets, pins, repins, RTs, and mentions. Also monitor your audience profile, top content shared, and comments received

Now What

With all the data you’ve collected, you have all the information you need to determine how effective your marketing is at this point.  But you have to organize it to understand what the numbers are telling you. A simple Excel file works perfectly.

After you identify the areas you’re going to track, at month end, pull the numbers and plug them in. Over time, you’ll see a trend that will show you which marketing content resonated with your audience and which did not.