You’ve researched your target market, written your marketing plan, and implemented marketing strategies.
So now you need to know how well your marketing approaches working. How do you know if your coupons are bringing in customers? Did you get any new customers from the free seminar you hosted? Is the sign/banner on display in front of your store notifying potential customers of your existence? Or what about your website? How much new and returning traffic is your website experiencing?
These are all valid and important questions to ask. Learning the answers to these questions will give insight into marketing strategies you should continue and those you should stop.
Consider these factors to measure marketing performance:
• Brand Awareness
• Customer Acquisition/Retention/Loyalty/Engagement
• Lead Generation/Management
• Sales
• Website Traffic
Metrics, such as Key Performance Indicators (KPI), are used in web analytics to measure website traffic. (If you do not have a website for your business, use surveys that ask questions about your brand, give coupons and count how many return, and have conversations with your customers to measure these factors.) There is no one set of KPIs that all businesses follow. KPIs are decided upon and uniquely tailored to your business.
For example, you may want to understand how people are finding your website, or how effective your website is at fostering an audience based on returning website visits, or the level of engagement of your social media campaign, etc. Once you decide what KPIs fit your business situation, establish processes to measure your website traffic using the analytic tools below.
• Google Analytics
• Bit.ly
• Piwik
• Open Web Analytics
• AdWords Grader Plus!
• Followerwonk (collects Twitter traffic)
Return on Investment (ROI) is another method to measure marketing performance. ROI is simply how much money you invested in relation to how much money you make.
There are three key factors used in determining ROI:
• Call to Act (CTA) - What marketing action persuaded the potential customer to become a paying customer? CTA is determined by using surveys, questionnaires, and analytic tools to help you determine what marketing campaign is enlarging your customer base.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – How much revenue will the average customer generate during their time with you?
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – How much did it cost to secure that paying customer?