How do you feel about your current marketing efforts? Are they measuring up to your expectations? Do you feel like they’re performing as well as they should? The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t really matter how you feel about your marketing. What matters is what your marketing efforts are doing for you. Do you know?
If you don’t know how your marketing efforts are performing (and are honest enough to acknowledge that!), you’re not alone. HubSpot recently reported on research that shows two-thirds of business-to-business marketers worldwide don’t report the financial contribution results of their marketing efforts to senior management. And 33 percent don’t even measure marketing return on investment (ROI) at all.
There’s an old advertising adage (attributed to Lord Lever) that says: “I know I’m wasting 50 percent of my advertising budget. I just don’t know which half!” That’s a scary thought. With today’s tight budgets, nobody can afford to waste a penny—let alone half of a marketing budget. But if you’re not measuring the performance of your activities you’re putting yourself in Lord Lever’s shoes.
That’s they beauty of today’s online marketing tools (and even of offline tools like direct mail). You can measure how they perform so you’ll no whether to try them again or not.
There are a lot of things you can measure. You’ll want to know how much traffic your different efforts generate for your website. You’ll want to measure how many qualified leads your offers generate. You can measure sales that are a result of a special offer through a coupon, a QR code, or a landing page. And your can measure what it’s costing you to do all these things.
And you know what’s really cool about all this measuring? Once you start measuring performance and making adjustments to your marketing strategy (by doing more of the things that work and eliminating the things that don’t), you’ll feel a whole lot better about your marketing!