The marketing rule of thumb is this: If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing. In other words, measuring your marketing matters SO much that the lack of it is a waste of your marketing efforts.
Why does measurement matter so much?
Without it, you don’t know the impact of your marketing. If you don’t know how effective your messaging has been, if it is on point, if it has garnered a response… you have learned nothing.
Marketing is not a one-shot deal. It isn’t a unidirectional message. It’s an ongoing process that touches your audience and then bounces back to you – much like the “ping” that a submarine uses to navigate deep waters. They send out a sound wave to see if it bounces back. If it does bounce back, the speed of the return sound tells them if something is nearby. If it does not bounce back, there’s nothing out there.
In a similar fashion, online marketing requires the ability to measure a response to be effective. How many people opened your message? How many people have viewed your Facebook post? These are important, quantifiable pieces of information that can help you determine the success of your marketing messages!
What’s especially nice about the online technology available today is that it provides the ability to measure your marketing. Your audience does not have to actively reply to a message in order for you to measure it. Systems are now available that can tell you if they opened your message, clicked on a link, viewed your Facebook post, and more!
What should you do to effectively measure your marketing efforts?
Newsletters & Emails: Send marketing emails using a system that automatically incorporates measurement of open rates and click rates. I have a preference for Constant Contact who I believe does an amazing job with analytics, but any email marketing system worth their salt will incorporate these tools.
Website & Blog: Google Analytics will help you dig in deep to see where people go on your website, how long they stay on any particular page, and much, much more. If you don’t have it now, set it up ASAP so that you can gather information over the long term and see what activities do and don’t work.
Facebook: Set up a business page in Facebook, which will offer you extensive analytics that you can’t get with a personal page.
Pinterest: New abilities to create a business profile and analyze Pinterest activities can help you take pinning to a whole new level!
Twitter: The best analysis capabilities here still seem to be through other platforms. Use Hootsuite or similar systems to get more out of your Twitter activities.
LinkedIn: If LinkedIn is a primary tool for your business marketing, using your business page will garner you more information. However, the large majority of people use Linkedin via personal profiles making this this is one of the tougher social media platforms to measure.
