Can’t Miss Strategies For Businesses To Win
John Wanamaker (1838-1922) said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted: the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Fast forward 100 plus years and marketers still wrestle with this challenge.
Most business owners have heard that digital advertising is highly trackable. Without a doubt, that is a fact. If you run a campaign, even just basic reporting provides information on users to your site, impressions served, clicks, click-through rate, and more.
The challenge is what a business owner can do with that data. Sophisticated marketers can compare these stats to historical data to see the lift brought by their campaign. Businesses selling products and services on their site can even tie campaign lift to revenue, which is the ultimate goal. For most companies, though, driving additional traffic to your website is a start, but it can be tough to measure what that traffic means to your bottom line.
There is a solution to this age-old challenge. The truth is that even though your report comes on the backside of your campaign, you have to start up-front to get meaningful metrics to evaluate success.
Let’s walk through how you can do a little legwork to understand your marketing results better.
Setting Your Campaign Goals
The first task is identifying the goals for your campaign. Example goals could include:
- – Acquire new leads
- – Drive store traffic
- – Phone calls to your business
- – Increase revenue (for e-commerce websites)
- – Social engagement
- – Position your business as an authority
- – Newsletter sign-ups
- – Event attendance
- – Brand recognition
The important thing is to make sure you set SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. By setting goals that meet these criteria, you’re creating a roadmap to evaluate your campaign’s success.
It’s also crucial to understand the average value of a customer. Does a new customer mean $20, $2,000 or $20,000 for your business? Knowing the average value of a customer will help you develop a budget that passes the gut check. Business owners have a gut feeling if a marketing investment will drive the results needed to pay for the campaign and drive new revenue. Gut feelings are important but putting a plan on paper can enhance our ability to evaluate a planned approach.
Finally, you’ll need to estimate your lead closing percentage. If ten customers walk into your store or fill out a lead form on your website, how many become customers? If your answer is two, then your lead closing percentage is 20 percent. This part is just basic math.
Taking Your Marketing to the Next Step
With this data, a website marketing company can help determine targeting and tactics that will drive the best results based on the goals you’ve set for the campaign. Your marketing partner can also enable goals and tracking within Google Analytics. And just like that, you can tie results back to an anticipated return on investment. If you’d like to see what that might look like in a report, click here and check out a sample.
