You write a witty Facebook post.

You spend hours crafting the perfect promo email.

You retweet somebody influential in your space.

You do blogs. Ads. Google ads. Facebook ads. You attend various networking groups and wax lyrical about your company’s services to anyone who will listen. No rock is left unturned in your pursuit of marketing excellence.

Yes, it’s time consuming, and yes, there’s a fair amount of spend involved, but it is driving traffic to your site, and that has to be considered a success… right?

Maybe.

Obviously, increased traffic is a good thing, but whether or not it is a true indicator of performance really comes down to how you define success as a business.

Defining success

In recent years, marketing has become less of an art and more of a science. The days of vague measurements of brand sentiment are long gone, replaced by an endless string of ones and zeroes that allow businesses of all sizes to calculate performance at an incredibly granular level.

Of course, being able to harvest this information is more or less pointless if you’re not applying it any meaningful way (i.e. using it to track performance and make business decisions), which means that marketers need to be mindful of their marketing goals now more than ever. Without clearly defined objectives, there’s ultimately no way of knowing whether or not your marketing is working. And the benefits are clear – marketers who set goals are more than four times more likely to report success than those who don’t!

So, what does marketing success look like for you? The answer to this question will naturally vary from company to company but, generally speaking, most businesses will have four major marketing goals:

• Building a brand
• Generating leads
• Converting leads into sales
• Establishing customer loyalty

After defining your specific goals, it’s a matter of setting KPIs to gauge performance and tracking whether your marketing efforts are moving your business toward your own unique definition of marketing success. This brings us to our next point…

Tracking performance

You might be surprised to learn that only 1 in 4 marketers are able to measure and report their contributions to the business. While there are probably a few factors at play here, one of the main reasons why so many businesses still struggle to gauge marketing performance is because they’re simply keeping track of the wrong things (or not tracking them altogether!). Here are a few tips to help you avoid becoming part of this statistic:

1. Track everything that can be tracked

For marketing analytics to be useful, they need to be tracked and analysed over the course of months and years. A snapshot of data from a specific point in time can be useful, but it may not be an accurate representation of long-term trends.

With this in mind, it’s important to start tracking and monitoring everything that pertains to your marketing goals. Google Analytics is one of the simplest (and most affordable!) ways to track website and app analytics, and Google offers a variety of tools to help get you started. Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feature their own analytics tools, but there are also third-party tools that provide greater functionality.

At Harper Digital, we offer our clients a live reporting dashboard that combines data from all sources and gives a snapshot of activity, allowing visibility into what’s being generated by each medium.

2. Assign a value to each step of the funnel

As you are probably aware, the purchase funnel is a model that illustrates the customer journey toward purchasing a product. Something that is less widely known is that each step in this journey can be translated into a dollar amount, and should ideally be assigned a monetary value based on the conversion rate of each individual step.

For example, let’s say your company sells a product worth $100. Thanks to your analytics (remember step #1!), you know that your sales team can close 10 percent of people who download your e-book, which means you can assign the action of downloading an ebook the value of $10 (i.e. 10 percent of $100). Similarly, if you know that 2 percent of people who opt in to your newsletter will buy your product, you can assign that action the value of $2. Monetising each step provides crucial insight into which parts of the funnel are working, and where you should be concentrating your efforts.

3. Compare attribution models

An attribution model is a set of rules that determine how credit for conversions are attributed to different marketing channels. Credit is usually given to the Last Interaction (the last action a customer takes before converting), but that may not necessarily be the right model for you.

For example, if your company is relatively new and your marketing efforts are primarily focused around brand awareness, you may find that the First Interaction attribution model is more suitable. Alternatively, if you believe that your marketing efforts become less valuable as time goes on, you may find that the Time Decay attribution model is a better fit. It’s important to take the time to assess different models to see which one is most applicable to your business.

Using data to achieve defined goals

Successful digital is attainable for companies of all sizes and budgets. Essentially, it boils down to defining your marketing objectives, setting KPIs to achieve those goals, and using data to measure your progress. Marketing with intent and taming the power of big data are key for every business that wishes to make the most of its marketing efforts.

If you’d like to explore this further, hit us up for a complimentary digital strategy session where we’ll work with you to come up with the best approach to measuring your business’s marketing activity.