How Do You Know Your Marketing Is Going Well?
This is very important. You don’t want to throw good money at bad marketing.
I find people get caught up in the wrong metrics. Even worse, a marketing agency may feed you data that makes the agency look good but doesn’t get you any closer to your goal.
Let’s be crystal clear about where you should focus your attention because there is a lot of data available. I mean, there are hundreds of data points you could look at, but most of them aren’t relevant to every campaign.
So, how do you know if your marketing is going well?
There is a short answer and a more detailed answer. Let’s start with the short answer.
Short Answer: You are meeting your objective and your success metrics are good.
We ask all our potential clients what their goal is or what they want their business to look like.
We get two consistent answers:
- I want more leads/clients.
- I want more people to know about my business.
If you aren’t getting leads or clients, then your marketing isn’t working. Below, I will explain in more detail the trap people fall into and what some bad or inexperienced agencies do.
If you aren’t engaging, then your marketing isn’t working. Some would argue that just having impressions can be enough, but from my experience, you are just yelling into the wind. I will explain more below.
Knowing your ultimate goal will determine how well your ads are performing. If this is not enough to decide, try other methods.
Focusing on these two examples of success metrics, let’s talk more about what common mistakes and traps people fall into and what you should consider.
For people who want more leads/clients, a common trap they fall into is focusing on the wrong metrics.
If a marketer knows you want to grow your business and got zero results but is trying to get you to focus on impressions and reach, 90% of the time they are covering their failure. If someone has done campaigns for you with no result except impressions and they still think they are doing a good job, run.
Often people get caught up in what I like to call, “Vanity Metrics,” which are likes, impressions, and video views. They are most directly associated with people becoming clients or leads. They feel nice and can be used to stroke egos very nicely, but they typically don’t put dollars in your bank account.
Success metrics will put money in the bank. You ideally want to focus on the key metrics that lead to someone becoming a sale. Some of these would be Click Through Rate, CPC, Landing Page Conversion Rate, and Sales Call Conversions Rate. If people aren’t clicking or filling out their details, then something is wrong. You will need to change parts of your marketing.
Ignoring this will cost you more than money. It could cost you market share or possibly your business.
If your focus is more, “I want more people to know about my business,” then I would focus on engagement.
It is a fair point to argue that just having a large reach and lots of impressions is enough to say you have spread the word about your business.
But I think there is a difference in people hearing about your business and knowing your business. Here are the two sides I see for this.
Any monkey can put lots of money behind a post or ad and get a huge amount of people to see it, but what message are you pushing? How well will they remember you once they need your service?
I do think impressions are part of the success metrics for this goal, but I think a more important metric is engagement or video views.
If you want more people to know about your business, you want them to know more than what your logo looks like. You want to explain to them what makes you trustworthy and credible. You want them to understand what value you bring to your client’s lives.
I think this is best done with no transactional offer but just content value. The more people consume, the more they will know, like, and trust you.
An example of this would be to have a post or video that leads people to free content that delivers value. You could have a post that goes over the five things people should know before they hire any…
Then, film yourself explaining the content (Some people prefer to read, some watch, and some listen. Cover all bases.) and push this towards your target audience.
If you are getting engagement on the post (people clicking to see more, commenting, likes or video views), then you can assume you’re targeting the right audience.
If you weren’t getting engagement but sent this out and got thousands of impressions, then you probably aren’t targeting the right people or the content isn’t relevant to them. Either way, something isn’t working.
This is just an overview of what is considered a good result. There is a more in-depth conversation around what a good Click Through Rate would be and Cost Per Impression. These typically fluctuate and change with every industry.
WordStream has a good article they used to update. It will mention at the top when it was last published. You can find it here. It has graphs for different industries stating what would be a good CTR and CPC. Currently, the overall standard for CTR is 0.90% and CPC is $1.72.
The picture I have for this blog is real and was for a traffic campaign. The objective is to get people to engage with their website. To put it simply, we kicked butt for our client 😉
If you want someone to look over your campaign to see if it is working or see what you can optimise, then contact us to have a chat.
Black Lion Digital, Newcastle. If you want this applied to your own campaigns, the Acquisition Audit is where it starts.
