When you first started up your business, you were probably told about the importance of digital marketing and why you should focus on it as a priority to get your business noticed. When done right, such a campaign sheds light on where your new customers spend time and money, and helps you learn how to solidify your positions as a reputable brand.
Unfortunately, most people don’t learn much about the follow-up to this; keeping track of your marketing efforts, which is equally important to your company’s success. You can spend a lot of money on PPC campaigns and social media influencer marketing, but how do you actually keep track of your marketing efforts? How do you know if they’re working? Can you compare them to different methods to see what’s more effective?
With those questions firmly in mind, here’s our IDEAL guide on how to tell if your digital marketing campaign is working.
MAKING USE OF DATA AND ANALYTICS
First, one of the most important things to learn is how to make use of data and analytics. You can learn more about PPC reporting tools to see how effective your campaigns are and how you can track the information with the tools you have available. The idea behind this is to see exactly how well your campaigns are performing with detailed statistics. By looking at these numbers, you’ll be able to discover different areas to improve, you’ll find areas which you’re lacking in, and you’ll see where you get the most engagement.
Data and analytics are extremely important when it comes to deciding future marketing campaigns as well. They can represent many different things such as your failures and successes in different areas, which is why it’s vital that you start keeping track of this information. If you fail to do this, you’ll find that it becomes almost impossible to see how well your marketing campaigns are performing.
LOOKING AT YOUR ENGAGEMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Another fairly simple way to see how well you’re performing is to look at your engagement on social media. While this doesn’t necessarily represent your market performance, it can help you understand how well you’re doing in terms of your online presence. A lot of smaller companies find it difficult to compete with larger businesses in pure marketing performance because their budget is a lot smaller. As such, it’s hard to stand out on regular channels such as PPC performance.
Instead of trying to combat these goliath corporations, smaller businesses tend to find more success when it comes to social media since everyone is on an equal playing field. A small business or even a single individual can build a huge presence that is on par with or even greater than larger corporations. It takes a lot of work and you need to be active on social media, but it’s well worth the benefits.
TRACKING KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
You should also make use of marketing key performance indicators to track your progress towards different goals. It’s a great idea to make use of digital services to improve your business and KPIs are an essential area to look at. There are a few of marketing KPIs that you need to be concerned about:
- Sales revenue – How much revenue has your marketing campaign generated? This is one of the more important and obvious KPIs to keep track of.
- Cost per lead – How much does it cost to acquire new leads? Calculating custom acquisition costs is important to help you pick the right marketing choices.
- Inbound marketing ROI – Seeing your investment in inbound marketing is important to assess your monthly and annual performance and budget spend.
- Customer lifetime value – Keeping customers for as long as possible can help extend the value of other KPIs. Make sure you inform existing customers about new products and give them loyalty benefits to improve this.
- Organic traffic – Traffic from organic searches can greatly improve your lead conversion rates. This is highly focused on search engine optimization and building more traffic to your website.
- Landing page conversion rates – Landing pages are important when it comes to generating leads. Make sure your monitor conversion rates from landing pages to see how well they’re performing.
- Social media traffic – Traffic from social media platforms can help improve your lead conversion rates, and it also highlights how powerful your social strategies can be.
- Mobile traffic, leads and conversions – Lastly, don’t forget that optimizing for mobile can help improve your marketing efforts. With over half the users on the web using mobile devices, this makes perfect sense to focus on.
There are many more KPIs to keep track of to help track your business growth, but this is a great place to start for smaller businesses.