With thousands of tools available online and a whole dictionary of buzzwords to get to grips with, working out how you can measure the success of your marketing and quantify progress is no mean feat. Below are four relatively simplistic ways to measure your marketing and see your brand grow: With thousands of tools available online and a whole dictionary of buzzwords to get to grips with, working out how you can measure the success of your marketing and quantify progress is no mean feat. Below are four relatively simplistic ways to measure your marketing and see your brand grow:
Decide on the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that indicate growth for your brand: It could be looking at your website traffic, brochure requests, email subscriptions or charting how many impressions your posts are getting on Facebook. Keeping track of these KPIs on a month-by-month basis will allow you to see your influence growing and highlight areas where you could improve. Of course, for most businesses it is commercial measures such as sales or profitability that are most important, so identifying and monitoring the marketing metrics that drive these is key.
Use Google Analytics: A brand’s website can play a significant role in the performance of the business so keeping an eye on how the site is performing is essential. One of the easiest ways to measure your web performance is to set up Google’s analytics service; it’s relatively simple and the most widely used web-analytics service on the Internet. It will allow you to accurately keep a handle on visitor numbers, how they got to your site, how they use it and the popular areas of your site, as well as monitor your e-commerce performance, and AdWords campaign effectiveness.
Engage with customer feedback: Often it’s best to hear how you’re doing direct from the people who matter: your customers. Engaging with their feedback will help you gain a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not. There are so many simple ways you can do this. Exhibiting your brand at events or trade shows is a great opportunity to get customers’ views on existing or new products. Look at all social media comments or direct messages; whether they are positive comments or negative complaints, you can learn from all feedback. And make use of online research tools such as SurveyMonkey that can help you measure customer satisfaction, profile customers or evaluate potential interest in new ideas.
Keep an eye on social media: It’s called social media for a reason – while some ‘vanity’ metrics such as your Twitter followers are limited in their usefulness, getting people talking about your brand on social media (often referred to as brand engagement) is a free and customer-driven way to build a following. Competitions where a follower can win by sharing an image, retweeting or tagging a friend is a free way to get your content to double the views with no costs involved. Like Google, more and more of the social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest provide a free “analytics service” to evaluate who is engaging with your brand on social media.