This article was contributed to CO— by Tiffany K. Schreane, marketing and advertising expert and professor with the Fashion Institute of Technology and Borough of Manhattan Community College.
There are so many factors to consider when running your own business: product, sales, customer base and more. Marketing is a pertinent channel to ensure you get your name and your business out into the world. And, as long as you develop a strategic and measurable plan that delivers actionable results, marketing for your business should not break the bank.
After establishing your marketing budget and identifying the marketing channels that best capture your target audience, the next step is to create a measurement plan that best monitors all marketing efforts. We will discuss five ways to measure your business marketing strategies for ultimate conversions and success.
Return on investment
Return on investment (ROI) is a narrative that tells how your marketing dollars are working for your business. A business does not have time or money to waste, so it is imperative to confirm that the dollars your business invests in marketing are working.
A common calculation for marketing ROI is:
(Sales growth – Marketing cost)/Marketing cost = Marketing ROI
This metric is great way to measure the impact of your marketing efforts on your business sales. Additionally, ROI allows the business to optimize marketing dollars by removing dollars from marketing channels that do not work and reallocating those dollars into channels that have proven to be more effective.
While visitors coming to your company website is great, it’s important to understand your visitors’ footprint on your website, including where they’re coming from and what they’re looking at.
Tiffany K. Schreane, marketing and advertising expert and New York-based professor
Analytics
Marketing expert Tiffany K. Schreane explains how analyzing levels of engagement helps business owners determine where to invest their marketing dollars. Read on for more ways to market your business.
Cost per engagement
Over the last few years, businesses have become increasingly more comfortable with investing in sponsored or paid posts on social and mobile. Once a business decides to go this route, it’s important to identify the audience that the posts should target as well as create compelling content and imagery that will position current and potential customers to engage.
A way to measure that your social and mobile marketing investment is working is to monitor cost per engagement — which means that business owners only pay when users engage with (i.e., click on) their posts. Paying only with customer engagement will give the business solid insight into the effectiveness of these mobile and social marketing efforts.
E-mail engagement
It’s relatively simple to set up a platform on your business website to capture visitors’ e-mail addresses to build out your e-mail customer base. E-mail marketing can be a hugely successful tactic, as long as the strategies are executed correctly, with proper timing so as not to overwhelm the recipient.
In an effort to ensure the success of your e-mail campaigns, measuring the following can help you monitor your marketing investment:
- Number of opened e-mails.
- Number of unsubscribes.
- Number of unopened e-mails.
These metrics will help determine the effectiveness of your businesses e-mail marketing campaign.
Number of downloads
Many businesses are in the field of educating their clientele. From whitepapers and webinars to webcasts and podcasts, the educational strategy you develop for your business will likely depend on audience preference and your budget.
Education is important because customers want to feel like they are more than just your customers —they want to feel like family.
The best way to measure audience feedback is to make sure to promote your content – i.e., sending e-mails, posting on social media and asking your customers to download your content — and monitoring the number of downloads your channel receives.
This is one metric that may take time to develop, because the more material your business puts out and the bigger your platform gets, the more downloads you will see over time – including new visitors downloading older material.
Overall website traffic
While visitors coming to your company website is great, it’s important to understand your visitors’ footprint on your website, including where they're coming from and what they’re looking at. Some metrics to watch when reviewing overall traffic are:
- What pages are the customers viewing?
- What is the average time that customers are spending on your page?
- Is there a specific page that is holding visitors attention a little longer than others?
- What is the geographical location of visitors?
These are just some key questions to help your business better define and understand the dynamic between your business’s website and your customers.
Remember, the key here is to not just throw dollars into a marketing funnel blindly, but to have a measurable program in place that best identifies how your business marketing dollars are working for you.
CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.
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