How Effective is Your Marketing? Find Out!

Many businesses and marketing professionals put a great deal of time, energy and money into an amazing marketing plan. A top-notch marketing plan is vital to the growth of any company. But, how effective is your marketing plan? Are you getting results? Do you need to change the way you connect to your target audience? Are your marketing initiatives making your business more successful? These are just a few important questions to ask. Smart business owners and marketing professionals will use tracking software to make sure they continually get better results from marketing.

Below are some of the most common tools you can use to track the effectiveness of your marketing.

What’s Going on With Your Website?

Websites are vital to the success of almost all businesses. Because of this, it’s important to know how your website is performing. Does it get any traffic? Where does the traffic come from? What are the most popular pages? More importantly, is the website driving leads and sales? These are important questions for you, but they are also important questions to Google. Google wants your website to be effective. Because of this, they have created a tool called Google Analytics. This tool is completely free and provides a wealth of information about your website visitors. Below are some of the insights that can be acquired through Google Analytics:

Audience

This area will give you information about the people who visit your website. You will discover the number of unique website visitors. You can see how long they spend on your website, how many pages they visit, and how many times they leave your website and come back again. Additionally, Google Analytics makes it possible for you to see their demographic information, where they are from, and what type of device they used to visit your website. You will get a very clear idea of who is visiting your website with the audience section of Google Analytics.

Acquisition

This section is just as valuable as the audience section. This is because the acquisition section informs you of how your website visitors found you. Let’s say you’re spending money on Facebook’s ads. It would be nice to know how many people actually came to your website because of these ads. Facebook analytics can tell you this. However, Google Analytics can tell you how long your visitors from Facebook actually spent on your website. It can also tell you how many pages they visited and even how many of them contacted you via email.

The acquisition section will tell you how many website visitors came from Google, how many typed your URL directly into the browser, and how many reached you via a third-party website. All this type of information is very valuable because you want to know what marketing tactics are driving traffic to your website.

Behavior

In this section of Google Analytics, you will be able to identify which pages are most frequently viewed. You can also see what pages bring the most website visitors in and which pages a website visitor is most likely to leave the website from. You can also see information about your website speed for each page, and get tips on how to improve the speed for these pages.

Although it’s good to have a website, it’s even better to have a website that drives traffic and works efficiently. Google Analytics is an amazing tool that helps website owners get the most of their websites. If you don’t already have this tool setup on your website, you should make it a priority to get it installed.

Is Your Email Marketing Effective?

Email marketing is incredibly valuable. Most studies show email marketing to have an average ROI of 3,800-4,400%. So, for every dollar you spend, you will get back about 38-40 dollars. That may be an average, but that doesn’t mean everyone gets these results. To make sure you get great email marketing results, it’s imperative to keep an eye on your campaigns and understand what does, and does not work. Here are some of the factors to consider when you look at your email marketing reports:

Open Rate

An open rate is the percentage of how many people opened an email that was sent. For example, if you send an email to 100 people, and 50 open the email, you will have an open rate of 50%. Open rates will vary by industry. However, most open rates will tend to be around 21%. What are your email open rates like? Are they only 5%? If so, something is probably very wrong and your strategy or approach should likely be revised.

Click-Through Rates

Another important email marketing metric is the click-through rate. This is also a percentage. Of all the emails that were sent, how many of them were opened, and then had a link that was clicked on? The average click-through rate is around 2.43% across all industries. When you send an email with a link in it, how often does someone actually click the link? Again, this is something that should be analyzed.

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Social Media Insights

Social media is one of the most common types of online marketing. It’s also one of the most powerful tools to drain your time. It’s easy to get lost in the world of social media. But the real question is; how effective is your social media marketing? Does social media drive traffic to your website? Is your phone ringing because people found you on social media? Are you connecting with your target audience and developing powerful and lasting relationships? How much are your social media efforts impacting the bottom line of your business? Thankfully, most social media platforms include their own analytics tools. Each tool may use slightly different terminology. But the main elements are the same. Here are a couple of the elements you should look for:

Engagement

This metric is an indicator of how interested people on social media were with your content. Did they “like” your content? How many people shared it or commented on it? The more interaction your posts had, the greater their engagement. The most engaging content will usually be the most effective at driving business your way.

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Reach

Newspapers and other print publications will tell you their content is put before so many people. If you place an ad in their publication, it will end up “reaching” a certain number of people. They will then price their ad at a certain dollar amount and give you the opportunity to purchase that ad placement. The same concept is true with social media. When you publish a post or tweet something on Twitter, that content will be put before so many people. Granted, they may not all take the time to even notice the ad, but it will still reach a certain number of people. How many people do your social media posts reach?

You may have great reach with your social media posts, but if the engagement is terrible, then the type of content being shared should change. On the flip side, if everyone likes and comments on your social content, but you only have a handful of people your content is reaching, then you should probably expand your network a bit more.

Call Tracking

This is one of the most underused tools but it’s incredibly powerful. Call tracking software allows you to create unique phone numbers for different marketing channels. For example, you could create one phone number for your business card, another for a billboard, another for your website, another for your email marketing blasts, another for your social media accounts, etc. You can create as many numbers as you want and need. Then, the software is also able to provide you a report that allows you to easily identify the channels that drove the most phone calls.

Some business owners will ask their clients or customers how they heard about the company. But, customers frequently don’t know. Or they will say “the website” when they really found the company through social media, which then lead them to the website. There are additional bells and whistles to call tracking software, but this is a good orientation on the topic. If you want to know what types of marketing make the phone ring, then you should definitely consider this type of tool. CallRail is one such tool that you may want to look into it.

How Effective is Your Marketing?

Seriously. How effective is your marketing? Marketing only works when it’s effective. In order to know if it’s effective, you should monitor your results. To do this, you will need to make sure the appropriate monitoring tools are set up and gathering data. You will also need to look at the results for each type of marketing you do. Then, figure out which areas need improvement. Once identified, decide on a way to enhance your effectiveness. If a certain tactic is a drain on your marketing budget, and it’s not bringing in leads, then consider re-purposing that money into something else. Use the information you glean to improve the quality of your marketing. Then, continue to market with your revised strategy. Always make sure to refine your marketing approach, so you can continue to drive leads and increase sales.

Let us know if you have any questions on how to set up Google Analytics, how to use call tracking software, or anything else. We are always happy to help. You can contact us via the contact form below. We look forward to hearing from you!

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