If you have a small business, you've likely got a proportionately small marketing budget. So whatever you spend, you'll want to be sure that it's working.
Measure your marketing campaigns by keeping track of the results. This is the best way to establish what's working and what's not. You can build in mechanisms at the start of your marketing campaigns to help you measure the results, such as:
- Create a specific landing page on your website for each campaign. You'll be able to directly attribute hits to that page, which you can see in your Google Analytics, from the campaign. You can take this a step further by including a form within the page and creating a goal in analytics to record when someone completes the form.
- Use virtual phone numbers with call monitoring that divert to your main number. As with the mechanism above, you’ll be able to attribute calls to that number from the campaign directly.
- Make use of campaign-specific codes. Each time a customer applies a code, you'll know which campaign that resulted from.
- Ask people making new enquiries how they heard of you, record this information and regularly analyse it.
Other ways to monitor whether your marketing is working or not is to keep a close eye on metrics such as:
- Website traffic - as well as volume, look at data such as the bounce rate, average time spent on your site, number of pages viewed and form completions.
- Social media activity - measure your number of followers, engagement, mentions and link clicks.
- Email stats - review the open rates, link clicks and new subscribers.
- Digital advertising stats - check the number of clicks, click-through rate and landing page completions.
The important thing is to regularly review, say at three-monthly intervals, so you can make informed decisions about where to spend your money. The more the monitor, the more you'll be able to allocate your budget to the marketing which delivers the best return.