Marketing is a must for any organization or company to boost sales, improve brand recognition, promote products, and earn loyal customers. Regardless of your business goals, marketing is essential in achieving them. Since your marketing strategies require time, preparation, money, and effort, it’s only natural to expect them to generate results.
Unfortunately, that might not always be the case. The truth is some strategies are bound to fail. If you fail to spot the caveat, you might waste a lot of resources and the energy of your marketing team. In order to prevent that, you need to apply ways to measure the efficacy and performance of your strategies.
It’s time for you to determine whether or not your marketing strategies are working in your favor. Here’s how you can go about it:
Discuss Opinions Of Focus Groups
You can tell if your marketing is working by gathering opinions and ideas on certain topics. This can be executed by taking advantage of focus groups. Digital marketing agencies from this site and other similar platforms can assist you on how to execute this strategy, if you haven’t tried it yet in the past.
A focus group collects a small group of people in a moderated environment to answer questions. Such questions are designed to shed light on a topic of interest, and the group is chosen based on predefined demographic traits.
While this is somewhat similar to gathering surveys, the main difference is that the group comes with representatives from different target audience groups. Instead of handing out multiple-choice questionnaires, which is common in surveys, focus groups are done in open-ended and interview-like settings.
It’s more accurate to gather information from people’s opinions about your products and services through focus groups instead of asking questions to a computer. Why? They’re free to share their honest opinions about your offerings.
The key to utilizing the focus group approach is identifying the right interviewees. Offer them rewards or gifts for their participation and time. Also, ensure to craft the right questions to ask so you can effectively use the gathered data to measure your strategies.
Measure Social Media Metrics
Applying social media strategies is one of the must-execute methods for many digital marketers. Fortunately, you can also analyze how these strategies perform through the metrics they provide. It’s great that social media metrics let you track pretty much everything. To measure social media effectively, you need to determine which metrics are most relevant to your business. Therefore, it’s best to go back to your marketing goals before analyzing your social media metrics.
Your business objectives, budget, and team size will determine the number of metrics you track. However, here are the three common elements that can make or break any social media strategy applied:
Reach
Reach refers to how many people see your content. Since you’ll be posting texts, photos, and videos as content, it makes sense to track down the number of people who’ve viewed them. Knowing whether or not your social media efforts are paying off is a good idea.
Followers’ Rate
Another social media metric to measure is your followers’ rate. These aren’t limited to your new followers at a specific time. Instead of measuring new followers individually, measure them as a percentage of your overall audience.
Engagement Rate
This refers to the percentage of engagements that your social media account has earned. Engagements can refer to post reactions, shares, and comments.
Hold Surveys
Many businesses create surveys online so they’ll be able to assess and evaluate how they’re doing. The same tactic can be applied if you want to know whether or not your marketing strategies are working in your favor. Your marketing strategy can also be affected by survey results regarding your target audience and business performance in general. Depending on the outcomes, you can use these data to improve your campaigns or specifically apply popular suggestions by your prospects.
There are different ways to get customers to fill out your survey. The popular one is to send out emails to your email list. You can also send out a survey link through SMS. And, lastly, you can encourage your clients to answer surveys when they visit your website. You can also offer rewards in exchange for their time and efforts in answering the survey.
Execute Promotional Events Analysis
Despite the fact that most of your marketing efforts may be moving online, there may still be some traditional methods you use. For instance, you may have held some trade shows and promotional events. Since these are done face to face, it can be more challenging to determine their efficacy. You may want to determine whether the event marketing expenses have exceeded your expected ROI.
There are different metrics to use to measure results. One is brand metrics, which measure your brand’s visibility during the event, including impressions or the number of people who saw your brand during the event. You can check such data through the attendance list that you asked attendees to fill up. The next metric is your lead generation metrics, which allow you to measure the number of prospects who can be converted into buyers of your products or services.
Do Website Data Analytics
The most straightforward way to determine the success of your marketing efforts is to measure your website traffic and visits. Whatever marketing tactic you’ve applied and spent a lot of money on, the most expected results are for your website traffic and clicks to increase visits.
Fortunately, there are data analytics tools and software that you can invest in. Some can be used for free, while some brands require usage fees. However, considering the accurate results you can get from the data analytics software, they’re definitely worth investing in. You’ll be able to use them for more marketing analyses in the future anyway.
As with most businesses, your website is probably where potential clients first look for information about what you offer. When analyzing website traffic, study how people resulted in visiting your site. This can be because of your social media accounts, emails, or SMS. You’ll be able to tell which digital marketing medium has resulted in more website visits.
Also, determine how much percentage came from organic searches. This will allow you to work on your SEO rankings to further improve your website rank.
Conclusion
By assessing what marketing strategies work and which don’t, you can save time and money for your business. It’s time to try something new if your expected results aren’t met. By measuring your applied strategies through the different ways presented above, you can finally tell which strategies to continue and which ones need to be replaced. Be creative and sharpen your wits if you want to be a marketing success.
