6 top tips for measuring your marketing performance

How to measure marketing

One of the first and most important lessons I learned in my marketing career was ‘always know your numbers’.  It turns out measuring your marketing performance is the absolute key to successful marketing, and equally as relevant for small businesses as it is for large.

1. Know your starting point

Understand where you are today by measuring your key marketing metrics.  These will be different for everyone depending on your business.  Some examples of what you should know are: –

• Visitors to your website
• Followers on Social Media
• Calls

You can measure these marketing metrics by the average daily, weekly, or monthly numbers depending on your business.  The period of time you choose doesn’t really matter for now, so long as you are consistent.

2. Know your sales process

This simply means the amount of stages in your processes where a potential customer could drop out before the sale is made.  Where do you start engagement, and where do you end, and what happens in between?  An example of this could be:-

Website Visit – Call – Quote – Sale

Once you know the different things to pay attention to, you can measure your conversion rates at each stage, then going forward when you spend money on marketing you can understand how much each campaign or channel is costing you.

3. Set clear objectives for marketing

Anytime you spend money or time on marketing activity you should know what you are trying to achieve, and why.   If it’s likes on your Facebook post then ask yourself why?  If you’re trying to drive sales then your objective should be about a stage in your sales process.

4. Measure marketing success

Once you start spending time or effort on marketing your business you need to make sure you understand the results, and to do that you need to track them.  If they are not already gathered for you, for example on a social media channel like Facebook, then you should always keep records.  How many calls did you receive per day or week, how many messages did you receive on messenger etc.  If it’s not really obvious where a customer came from, ask them and record it.

5. Work out your costs

This is a really important step but it doesn’t have to be complicated.  A simple spreadsheet will work really well.  Ultimately you want to understand how much it costs you to achieve your goal, which in the example below is a sale.  The activity cost £100, but this could equally apply to the number of hours spent on activity if it didn’t cost actual money.

Visits to website	Calls	Quotes	Sales
50	20	10	5

Conversion Rates	Visits to Calls	Calls to Quotes	Quotes to Sales
	40%	50%	50%

Cost per Visit	Cost per Call	Cost per Quote	Cost per Sale
£2	£5	£10	£20

6. Compare

If you use the same system above to measure all of the marketing that you do, you will soon be able to compare the performance of the different activities.  This will provide valuable information which often isn’t what you were expecting.  One type of activity could drive loads of calls but hardly any sales, where another might deliver fewer calls but from people who are more likely to want to buy your product or service.

The benefits

If you don’t measure marketing performance then you won’t know what works for you, and you risk wasting valuable time and money on doing the wrong stuff.  Unfortunately, this is a costly mistake that too many companies make.  In summary, the benefits of tracking are: –

• Know where you are against your objectives
• Understand what each individual activity costs
• Be really clear on what works for you
• Stop making costly mistakes
• Start seeing better results

So if you don’t already have one, start that spreadsheet today, its never too late! Thanks to Halo Effect Marketing for this article - visit their blog for more insight or find more articles in the GrowthBox advice page.

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