How to make your business marketing count!
Spending money on sales and marketing, but not sure you’re getting any return? Then it’s time to make sure you’re measuring the right things.
1. Leads
The reality is you need leads to make sales, and your website can be a valuable source of sales leads if you know how to capture them. Most people will not part with their personal information unless you offer something in return. Whether it is an educational white paper or webinar, a free trial or a demo, the offer needs to be seen to provide enough value to the visitor to encourage them to give you their name, number, email and whatever else you need to follow up with them and make a sale.
You need to generate enough leads to keep your sales team busy. Knowing how many you have, and whether that number is growing or decreasing year over year, is a key performance indicator of whether or not you’re going to hit your sales targets. By tracking your leads, you’ll soon learn how many you typically need to make a sale, so you’ll then be able to set lead targets and measure attainment too.
2. Cost per lead
Rather than use a general figure, do a deep dive to find out the cost per lead for each marketing channel you use and identify which are the most cost-effective. Do only cold leads come from your Adwords PPC campaign? You won’t know unless you or your marketing firm generate ongoing detailed reports. From this report, you may discover that some of your ads are doing great, while others are not. Time to stop wasting money on the unsuccessful ones!
Gathering information on all of your marketing channels is valuable data to help you determine what is working and what is not. You shouldn’t, however, cut back on a channel simply because it costs more per lead; you might find that customers from that channel spend more than customers from another, less costly channel.
3. Landing page conversion rates
This helps you establish whether your content and landing pages are resonating with your target market. If you’re not measuring the performance of your landing page, how do you know if it’s succeeding or flopping? Here are some metrics to keep in mind when measuring landing page performance: number of visits, conversion rate, bounce rate, time on page. If these numbers aren’t good then it’s time to adjust your landing page. Could the wording and layout be improved? Should the download button be more obvious? Do you have too much or too little wording?
Now’s the time to get the big picture of your landing page’s performance and make changes accordingly to improve results. You can then break down your leads based on which offers they’ve completed.
4. Website analytics
When was the last time you or your marketing firm looked at you website analytics? This valuable data shows you what website pages are looked at the most, the average length of a website visit, and the navigation your visitors take through your site. You can also see where your website visitors are actually coming from – direct, referral or organic and how many are being converted into leads and customers.
Traffic arriving directly to your site, or from a Google search is a good indicator that awareness for your brand is growing. All marketing efforts contribute to brand awareness, so this is a useful measure to gauge the overall performance of your marketing as a whole. If you’d like to dig a little deeper into website analytics to help your business, read our in-depth article on how website traffic analytics can improve business.
Above all, always remember your website is your storefront. The more people you have looking through that window the more likely it is that someone will step through the door and buy something. Data collecting from your site analytics is very important to your overall marketing strategy and success.
5. Revenue
Looking at how much revenue each channel is actually generating gives you a more objective way of identifying your most effective marketing channels. This both justifies your continued investment in successful channels and allows you to reroute funds from less successful ones to experiment with other strategies.
How much money are you actually making? This is what all your efforts come down to. There’s no point generating traffic, leads, and opportunities if you can’t turn them into actual sales. Ultimately, this is the small business KPI (key performance indicator) that counts the most.
Revenue is the goal of all marketing activity, so it’s the most important one to measure. Which traffic sources deliver the most closed revenue? Know this and you have the answer to marketing ROI. Monitor and map the customer journey so you can optimize and improve each metric and watch your marketing efforts filter through to your bottom line.
Of course, stats mean nothing if you don’t do something with them!
Tracking is everything! Measuring your marketing metrics should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Getting to the people and journeys behind the numbers delivers insights that help you repair leaky funnels and direct funds into your most successful marketing methods.
