Is Your Marketing Getting Results?

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Marketing is an essential practice for helping to attract business. By finding the right marketing strategies, you can increase the number of customers that you attract.

However, in order to find those ‘right' marketing strategies, you need to be measuring the success of each of your marketing campaigns. If you don't check the results, you'll never know if your money and hard work is being put to good use. Analysing your campaigns can help you to work out which campaigns are successful, who is being attracted by them and what you can do to improve future marketing campaigns.

But how do you measure the success of a marketing campaign? Below are just a few different strategies for determining the results of your marketing.

Start using analytics
Analytics are the most effective means of measuring results when marketing. This involves capturing data in the form of stats and graphs and analysing it for trends.

A few examples of data analytics that can be useful in marketing include:

• Sales analytics: If you've been promoting certain products, sales analytics could help you to determine whether sales on these products have been increasing or not.
• Website analytics: By gathering data on website traffic, you can determine whether specific marketing tactics have been increasing the amount of visitors and whether these visitors have been converting into leads.
• Social media analytics: Social media analytics can help to determine which posts have been getting the most engagements and leads.
• PPC analytics: Gathering data on your PPC advertising campaigns can help you to determine who is clicking on your ads and the actions that they take afterwards.
• Email analytics: Email analytics can help to work out which emails your subscribers are clicking on and whether these emails are converting into leads.
• Telephone analytics: When making sales calls, you can also use analytics to work out which callers are picking up and which are converting into leads.

It can be worth making use of a range of analytics, depending of course on which marketing tactics you are using. Using modern digital tools such as Whatagraph, it's possible to track live data on all your separate marketing campaigns at the same time. Having all this data in one place can be very useful for seeing which marketing tactics are the most effective.

Be wary that some consumers may not want to give their data to you. When collecting website visitor data or email subscriber data, it's worth always asking for permission.

Heat map your website
When it comes to designing a website that generates leads, it can be worth looking into heat mapping tools as well. These allow you to see which areas of your website visitors are being drawn to.

Such data could be useful for working out whether visitors are scrolling down pages and which products they might be looking at the most. This information can also be used to optimise the layout of your website in order to generate more leads. For instance, if lots of visitors seem to be dwelling around a certain part of a webpage, this could be a good place to put a call-to-action button or possibly trigger a pop-up.

Use A/B testing
A/B testing involves launching two marketing campaigns together and comparing the difference between each one to work out which campaign is more effective. Both campaigns will usually be very similar with only slight differences. For instance, you might decide to promote the same post twice on social media but aimed at different age demographics to see which one engages with your ad more.

A few examples of other ways to use A/B testing could include:

• Setting up two webpage variants and directing visitors to each of them to work out which webpage gets the most leads.
• Sending out two different variants of the same email to your subscribers and seeing which email is opened and engaged with the most.
• Launching two Google advertising campaigns targeted at the same demographic but triggered by different search terms to work out which keyword attracts the most leads.

A/B testing is great for testing the effectiveness of small details, allowing you to improve upon each marketing campaign by making small tweaks.

Use call tracking
When you receive a phone call, it's possible to use call tracking to work out where that caller found your number. There are three main ways to do this:

• By setting up call buttons on your adverts and websites that allow smartphone users to quickly call you from their devices, you can digitally track how many people are clicking these call buttons.
• Alternatively, you could set up different numbers and advertise these in different places. By being able to track which number the caller used, you can then work which advert they must have seen in order to find this number.
• Another way of tracking calls could be to simply ask each caller over the phone where they found your number. This might not allow you to track missed calls, so bear this in mind.

Conduct surveys
When it comes to traditional marketing tactics such as sending out flyers and putting up billboards, you cannot always easily digitally track leads. While you may be able to use call tracking by providing a unique number on the ad, this may leave out leads who visit your website afterwards or go into your store and buy a product after seeing your ad.

Surveys can be a useful way of finding out exactly where each customer has found you. You can automatically send out surveys to customers after making a purchase from your site, you can give out physical survey cards or you can survey callers over the phone.

When it comes to measuring brand awareness, you may even be able to survey random consumers, ask them if they have heard of you and if so then determine how they may have heard of you. These could be targeted online paid surveys or surveys aimed at passers-by on the street (if you are a local business).

Focus on leads, not likes
It's important to remember your goals when measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. Social media is a great example of where people can lose touch of goals when marketing. Some company owners can become obsessed with generating likes and comments on posts. However, these same companies may not actually get any leads from their posts.

If your goal is to simply increase brand awareness on social media, you could find that metrics such as likes and engagements are suitable measures of success. However, if your goal is to generate new leads and customers, you may want to consider putting a focus on tracking users' activity after they click on your social media post. If this same user clicks on a product link within your post, it's a much surer sign that your advert has caught their interest and you can count them as a ‘lead'. If they then purchase that product, you can then confidently say that your ad has helped generate a new customer. By focusing on this end stage, you could develop a much more effective marketing strategy.