Having worked with dozens of companies on a wide variety of marketing projects, there seems to be one thing in common:
So often, we spend our time and effort on exactly the wrong things.
And we tend to know this instinctively. We realize that the work we do often doesn’t get results. This is true for many things in life. But it’s especially true with marketing.
I see this all the time with small businesses. They spend hours scheduling and deploying social media posts, they buy ads that don’t get any results or phone calls, or they waste time without a good strategy. Marketers waste time and effort that would otherwise be put to good use.
Peter Drucker used to say, “What gets measured, gets managed.” And it’s true. If you’re not measuring your marketing, you’re missing huge opportunities.
The truth is, today we have the best tools we’ve ever had to measure our marketing. There’s no longer an excuse not to do so. In this post, we’ll discuss some methods we can use to help you measure your marketing.
Google Analytics:
First and foremost, you need to install Google Analytics on your website. That’s the easy part.
But you must also setup goals. There are two types of goals – macro and micro. Macro goals are things like filling out a Contact Us form or picking up the phone to give you a call.
Micro goals are much smaller. One of our favorite micro conversions is signing up for your email list. This allows you to continue to market to them continually.
We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of setting up goals in Analytics in this post. But your web developer and marketing team should be able to do it easily. It’s really not complicated and there are dozens of tutorials on how to setup goals online. By not having goals, you’re missing the most important Google Analytics data.
If you have an eCommerce store, the tools are even more powerful. You can know every time someone makes a purchase. You can understand where customers are coming from. We know how they discover us. eCommerce tracking allows you to track down to the penny.
Wouldn’t that be useful information?
Coupons:
If you’re working in offline channels, how do you determine which advertising channels are working? How do you know if that $5000 ad spend in the magazine is working?
The simple answer is coupons. Create custom coupons for each place you advertise. Then code those coupons differently. At the end of the month, count up the number coupons you got from each source. Voila! You now know which channels are working.
Phone Call Tracking:
Today we can create multiple phone numbers that are unique to our business. These phone numbers cost around $3/mo. You can put these on your various ads and web properties and then track how many calls you get from each number.
To the end user, this process is seamless. They don’t know that it might not be your main number, but you’ll be able to track where the call originated.
We use this method to help measure leads for businesses that rely primarily on inbound calls. Without this tracking, we have no idea on how well our marketing efforts are working individually.
Conclusion:
In order to understand where you should dedicate your marketing time and resources, you need to know what is working. And you don’t know what is working unless you track what is working.
Today’s tools give you the best opportunity ever to track your marketing. It’s true that it takes discipline, but once you commit and get a system in place you’ll be able to get a much better ROI from your marketing dollars.
After all, isn’t that what we all want?
Tyler Brooks is the Founder of Analytive. He helps clients create marketing campaigns that drive results. If you’re struggling to get results or measure results for your campaigns, he’d love to help.
