Are your marketing expenditures making an impact? It pays – literally – to know.
By Roy Harryman
Assessing results is a non-optional part of marketing. Although this process is not 100% foolproof, it’s possible to measure much more now than in the analog days.
Back then, if you bought a newspaper, TV or radio ad, how could you tell if it moved the needle? What about direct mail, billboards and banners? Or flyers on doors? There were some rudimentary things you could measure. For example, you could say, “Tell ‘em Bob sent you!” Or you could provide a discount code. But often you were left guessing. This has been the Achilles heel of traditional advertising, a conundrum made famous by a nineteenth century business executive: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Digital media has made it increasingly possible to measure the impact of most of your marketing expenditures. Yet advertising is so varied that we’ll probably never be able to get 100% reporting. But we can certainly get closer than before.
Even traditional media (print, TV, radio) can be more readily measured due to tools such as QR codes, discount codes and the technological blending of TV and the web.
Social media platforms can generally let you know how many people:
Saw your post
Liked your post
Shared your post
Followed a link to your website landing page
And more
Email marketing software informs you of how many people opened your email and what actions they took, including how many visited your site and bought something.
Website measurement tools such as Google Analytics (now called GA4) let you know how many people visited and which pages they landed on (and much, much more). It also lets you know how viewers ended up at your site. For example, did they follow a link from Facebook? Or type the name of your site directly? The level of details from web analytics tools is impressive – even overwhelming. Using them, you can identify a path you want web visitors to take, then determine how many follow it. The intended end of the journey can mean hitting the “buy” button, setting up a consultation or making a donation.
Social media, email and websites can all work together toward the same goal. All can have a hand in directing the consumer toward a particular outcome. Setting all this up and interpreting the data may require some outside assistance. But it’s good to know what’s possible. You have to know if your strategy is working.
Some personalities may chafe at this. Why? Because it's easier to just start doing stuff than to learn whether the stuff is working.
But to be a wise marketer, ask yourself this question before you begin a campaign: What would success look like? How would I know if I achieved it?
Then, like a skilled tailor, measure before striking out again.
Roy Harryman is the author of “Small Business, Big Impact: A No-Nonsense Marketing Strategy For Companies That Do More With Less.” This column is an excerpt from the book.