Marketing is key to attracting customers. However, it’s important to choose the right marketing tactics. Too many companies pour time, effort and money into marketing strategies that don’t work. And they continue to do so because they never stop to check the results. By looking at what your marketing is achieving you can determine whether to stick with a strategy or try different methods. Below are just a few ways to analyse your marketing results.
Take a look at your sales
Sales figures are often the best indicator of whether marketing is working or not. If sales have increased after trying a new marketing strategy, it’s usually a sign that this marketing strategy has been effective. If sales stay the same or fall, it’s a sign that your marketing hasn’t worked. Of course, it’s possible to get by on return business and word of mouth marketing – which is why it’s important to consider who your customers are and where they’re coming from.
Survey your customers
If you’re getting customers, it’s worthwhile surveying each of them to find out how they discovered you. You could ask customers in person/over the phone, send a survey email after doing business with them, or ask them to fill out a physical survey card/form. The survey results will tell you exactly which marketing strategies are working. You can provide incentives for customers to complete surveys such as the opportunity to win a competition or a return discount.
Analyse your website traffic
When it comes to selling services or products online, you may only be able to use survey emails – and even with incentives, not every customer will be willing to complete a survey. Fortunately, you may be able to still find out where these online customers are coming from by using website traffic analytics. The likes of Google analytics can tell you which sites visitors are arriving via – which could help you determine how many visitors you’re getting from social media or search engines. Query parameters can also be added to online adverts to tell you when customers reach a certain web page after clicking on an advert or email. In fact, query parameters may allow you to trace an individual’s visitor’s journey through your website to the checkout page. Just be wary that not all visitors will be willing to share their data, so you won’t be able to analyse every visitor.
Monitor your sales team
If you’ve got a sales team helping to generate leads for you, make sure that you are monitoring them and doing monthly reports to see what each sales rep is achieving. You don’t want to be paying a sales team a lot of money to achieve nothing. Sales team KPIs are a great way to measure the performance of your sales staff. You can then reward sales reps who are achieving results and support sales reps that aren’t getting results.
Remember that likes don’t pay the bills
When marketing your business on social media, it’s easy to mistake social media engagements for success. While it is important for brand awareness to build up a social media presence and create engaging content, it’s important that your social media marketing is converting people into customers. Take pride in the fact that your content is getting likes – but compare it to your sales figures, survey results and web traffic to make sure that a few likes isn’t all you’re getting.
