Measure all marketing activity
What was the best thing that you did to promote your business in the last 12 months? Can you identify what made it work? How much did it cost? What exactly did you get from it?
It makes sense that if we have a campaign that works exceptionally well that we would want to repeat it again right? But how do we really know which campaign worked if we have not measured the return from each activity? You may not have invested money into each thing that you tried, but there would have been a cost implication, even if it was your time (which in business is incredibly precious). The ultimate success of any marketing campaign is making the till ring, and counting the money that’s taken, but there are many ways to measure marketing activities, so here a few ideas to get you started:
- Google Analytics – If you run a website – I’d strongly recommend that you have google analytics linked to your website. You can determine busiest traffic days on your website, where (geographical location) your visitors have come from, which website referred them to your website, keywords that were searched to bring the traffic to your site. I know many businesses that leave their google analytics to be run by their web design company, however, in my opinion you need a good understanding of where your customers are coming to your website, and always track dates of any marketing campaigns that you run, so that you can measure the results via google analytics.
- Non-Geographic numbers – It’s a good idea to use a different non-geographic number for each marketing campaign. You can link lots of different non-geographic numbers to the same land line number, however, you will receive reports for each of the numbers, so you can see which number received more calls, and therefore check which campaign you allocated that number to, and this will show you which activity was the most successful.
- Coupon/offer codes – If you are running a promotion (either on or offline) it’s a good idea to generate coupon codes, so that each customer must redeem the coupon to get the offer – this is a great way to measure the success of each offer.
- Customer survey – It doesn’t have to be a full page survey – a simple question of “where did you find out about us?” will help you to determine where the majority of your customer’s heard about your business/offer/product/service. If you have a website where a customer can purchase from or a membership site, it’s essential to add a button on the shopping cart for customer’s to indicate where they found out about your website.
- Facebook Insights – If you are doing a lot of your marketing activity on Facebook, be sure to track your Facebook insights so that you know which comments/posts attract the most attention.
- Ker-ching – The sound of your ringing till – this is the ultimate way of measuring a return on investment for your marketing – be sure to record along with daily/weekly/monthly takings which marketing activities were happening.
