Is your marketing working?

Probably not, if you’re having to ask that question.

Sorry - that might seem a little churlish of me, but let me explain…

Welcome to Vegas

Let’s say you need to buy a new piece of equipment for your office. You’ve identified the need, you know it will speed up operations, make the team more efficient and therefore deliver a measurable return on investment.
So, you head online, search for the device in question and purchase the first one you see. No research, no consideration, no speaking to people who have used it before - just straight in with the company credit card.
This is akin to playing the slots in Vegas! What if your choice turns out to be a lemon? What if, rather than raising efficiencies, it introduces new hurdles people have to navigate each day and continually breaks when put under strain?
Marketing is no different. If you’re spending money on Google Ads, external social media management and countless hours blogging each month, are you investing as much time analysing the results? If not, you’re spending blind, and that’s an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

Measuring your marketing - properly
I’m a big advocate of spending as least as much time analysing the results of your marketing as you do producing the content.

Here’s why you should do it:

• it’ll provide a return-on-investment (ROI) figure that will help you decide whether to carry on spending or cease;
• it’ll help you discover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in your marketing plan; and
• it’ll help you make better decisions about the business.

…And here’s three measurement techniques that should be foremost in your mind:

1. Find out how much it costs to acquire a customer
What’s the cost of bringing a new customer on-board? The customer acquisition cost (CAC) will demonstrate how profitable your company is (or isn’t).

You can work this out by dividing the total advertising, marketing and sales costs incurred during a specific period by the number of sales gained.

2. Discover the customer lifetime value (CLV)
There’s such a thing as an unprofitable customer, and it’s just as important to find those clients as it is your biggest spenders.

The CLV determines how much they’re worth to you during their time as a customer, and you should be able to calculate this pretty easily from either your CRM system, accounts package or a simple totting up of invoices.

Hint: if your CAC is £50 but the CLV is £500, your marketing is working pretty well.

3. USE Google Analytics
It’s something most businesses set up when they first have a website built - usually at the request of the web agency - but it’s also the tool that is often left to its own devices.

Google Analytics is brilliant. The amount of insight you can glean from its many reports is simply mind-blowing, and will give you an amazing insight into how your marketing is performing.

It’s a bit of a behemoth, granted, so pay particular attention to the following metrics:

• New and unique visitor conversion - find out the mix of sales you’re getting from return business and first-time visitors
• Traffic sources - where are your website visitors coming from?
• Bounce rate - which pages aren’t doing their job?
• Average time on site - are you engaging people for long enough or losing their interest quickly?
• Value per visit - divide the number of visits over a given period by the revenue generated via web sales; while not an exact licence, it will demonstrate how hard your website is working for the business

You’ll probably need some help here, but it’s worth investing in the services of an external expert if you’re to get the most from Google Analytics.

Conclusion
I don’t want you to waste your marketing spend, and I certainly don’t want you to waste your time creating marketing campaigns that simply aren’t making a jot of difference to your business.

My tips above will help you measure and make changes based on results, but if you want to chat these ideas through in more detail, just get in touch!