When trying to lose weight, it is recommended to take a “before” photo of yourself. With this picture you can witness your transformation as you hit your goal weight. Sometimes changes are small and go unnoticed on a daily basis. In this same vein, I recommend noting how your business looks today. Review financials, website visits, social media following, or anything else you hope to improve through marketing.
While you achieve an anecdotal understanding of your progress while marketing, numbers don’t lie. Seeing your growth from the start helps you to appreciate your marketing’s power.
How do you assess where you are?
There are numerous ways to measure marketing success. In general, these metrics are referred to as Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs for short.
An example of a common KPI is the number of unique users who visited your website during a specific period of time.
Another example is the number of visitors your website received from a specific geographic area. This is important for businesses targeting the local community.
When email marketing, one goal KPI would be increasing the open rate of your email deployments by X%. This is a strong indicator of how well your subject lines are enticing recipients to open your email.
What marketing tools should you use?
Capturing these counts before you launch your next marketing campaign gives you a figure to compare to when the campaign has concluded. You can use tools like Google Analytics or MonsterInsights to track these metrics.
Sometimes, however, the count of visitors is simply not enough. Taking your efforts to the next level often involves tracking actual leads or prospects early in their buyer’s journey, on their way to becoming qualified leads. While the intricacies of that configuration warrant its own article, know that there are tools available to track such data. For this, I recommend checking out the HubSpot platform.
For email marketing, I suggest using a platform like Constant Contact or MailChimp which can provide the data you need to determine the success (or failure) of subject lines, body copy, deployment times, and more.
Regardless of which tools you deploy, it’s important to take a snapshot of where you are today if you plan on tracking success tomorrow.
To learn more about marketing your small business, check out our What you need to know to market your small business article.
