How do you know if your marketing efforts are making a difference to your business?

You have a feeling that what you are doing is pretty good and you have a few extra followers on twitter but is all the effort really contributing to the success of your business? It’s important that you measure your activities so you can make informed decisions. Decisions on continuing with certain activities and abandoning others.

What to measure

Start by making a list of all the online activities you are involved in. That list will contain your website, social media channels and may include email marketing and online advertising. With your website you want to measure your visitor numbers and what channels they are coming from. You will also want to measure what they are doing once they visit your site, what pages they are looking at and how long they stay for.

On your social media channels you will want to see what content was the most popular. You will measure new interactions like new followers, likes, comments and shares. These are all indicators of how engaged your audience are with your content.

With email you will look at the number of opens, click through from the links and unsubscribes. This will give you a good indication on how valuable the email was to your recipients. With paid advertising you will measure you click through rate to compare the cost of the campaign relative to the extra revenue gained.

How to measure

There are lots of tools to use to measure things in digital marketing, be that your website, email campaigns or social media channels. With your website you will use Google Analytics which will give you a wealth of information on how your visitors interact with your site. Each social media channel will have its own analytics or insights function to give you information on engagement and impressions.

What the numbers mean

You should measure your website at least monthly and watch the changes to see where the success lies. Is your traffic up? If you have a form on your website, how many people completed it? If you are selling on your website, how many people got to the checkout page? How many extra visitors did you get to your website and what pages are the most likely to be viewed? All will give you insights on your success.

With social media you will measure more often, here it is all about which channels are producing the most new leads. What blog posts are engaging people and encouraging them to visit your website? What type of content blogs/ images/ video are performing the best? With the results you can then do something about it, repeat the good stuff, ditch the bad stuff.

The goals

Digital marketing activities are there to support the sales effort, that is the bottom line. You want to create sales leads, find new customers to sell to, sell more to existing customers and ultimately get more revenue for your business by selling more. It’s as straight forward as that.

Remember marketing is not an expense for the business it is a long term investment in growing the business and increasing sales.