Do you know if your current marketing strategy is successful in helping you meet your business goals? In this age of digital marketing, the key to measuring success of your current marketing strategy and knowing what to attribute the performance to is this: Data and Analytics.
More and more companies are embracing the idea of analytics and measuring their marketing effort. However, according to B2B Data Activation Priority report by Forrester Research in 2018 based on a poll of 500 B2B professionals, only about 52 percent of companies are using data to make marketing decisions while the rest rely on intuition and experience. Less than half of those respondents claimed that their company is capable of converting data into insight to act on customer needs.
Many companies are still not sure about investing their resources into measuring and analyzing their marketing strategy because they find it difficult to manage and utilize the data correctly and effectively.
We cannot stress enough the importance of marketing analytics because it allows you to see what’s working, what needs to be improved, and whether you are meeting the level of return on your investment. It also helps you set expectations and goals for your business and its marketing strategy.
How to Start
Before deciding what to measure, make a list of questions for your business. What do you want to accomplish and what do you need to know to accomplish those goals? Design your analytics around those questions and find answers for your business. Down the road, it will be critical to keep a documented strategy for your business and performance measures.
Next, you need the right tools. A good one to get started with is Google Analytics. Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, as well as most of the social media and email marketing platforms also offer metrics with their service. As there are numerous options available for marketing analytics tools, both free and paid, we suggest that you evaluate your business and search for tools that suit your needs.
What to Measure
- Total Visits
- Organic Search Traffic
- Click Through Rate
- Customer Acquisition
- Customer Retention/Loyalty Rate
- Conversions
- Sales
- Bounce Rate
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Generation
- Engagement
- Cost Per Lead
- Cost Per Acquisition
- Overall Return on Investment
If you are just getting started, start with measuring only a few marketing activities and then gradually expand. And remember that this is a long-term task. It will take time, but eventually, you will be able to understand your numbers, begin to see year-over-year trends, and make business decisions with those numbers. Analytics will lose relevance if not viewed over a long period of time.
The marketing world will never stop evolving, but the one thing that will never change is measuring its effectiveness, so you can prove the value of your marketing efforts. If you maintain a steady analytics review process, you will be making optimal decisions for your business growth.