Measurement is absolutely critical to making sure your marketing spend is as effective as it can possibly be. Who wants to be blowing their money these days?
We measure our waistlines, the height of our children and our bank balance, but how many business owners truly measure their marketing results? Not enough unfortunately, because measurement often gets thrown in the administrative “too hard” basket. It’s seen as the optional, boring data stuff rather than the business-building, cost-saving tool it is.
A business that markets itself well:
- Builds brand awareness.
- Constantly increases the return on investment (ROI) from their marketing expenditure.
- Reduces the cost of acquisition of new customers.
That’s why when it comes to measurement, you need to measure more than just responses to ads, you need to also measure your brand awareness. Why? Because the higher your brand awareness, the lower your cost of customer acquisition and the greater the return your marketing spend achieves.
In the past it’s been difficult and costly to track and measure brand awareness which is why so many businesses haven’t even bothered, but the good news is, the new marketing environment makes it easier to measure than ever before.
Your website is the perfect tool to track brand awareness without the costly methods employed by big business. For example, a web site with good, free, reporting tools (like Google Analytics) allows you to track key indicators of the awareness of your brand from something as simple as the source of your website visitors.
The key things you want to keep track of are:
- Direct Traffic – Traffic that comes to your site because they’ve typed your business domain name directly into their browser. The higher your direct traffic the more people are aware of your business and where to find you on the internet.
- Searches specifically for your company name - Google Analytics (and some other reporting tools) can show you what keywords people have typed into a search engine to find your business. The number of searches using specifically your company name will give you an indication of brand awareness.
Tech savvy business owners are taking it one step further by monitoring Social Media (platforms such as Twitter and FaceBook) to evaluate the “buzz” around their brand, tracking the number of mentions in “Tweets” and the health of their brand in the marketplace (for example: are the conversations online about their brand positive or negative?). With news of an imminent release of an analytics tool for Twitter, this is surely only going to become more measurable, and an affordable and simple option for the less tech savvy among us.
The technical stuff aside, referrals from non-customers are also a good indication of a healthy brand. Have you ever had a friend ask you for a recommendation for a product or service, and you’ve been able to recall and recommend a company you have never used, but know enough about them to remember their name and what they offer? This kind of referral only happens when a company’s marketing strategy is well rounded, well targeted and well implemented. You can measure this type of brand awareness by asking your customers “how they heard about you” whenever you get the opportunity…whether it be during a phone call or on a website form, or via exit surveys in a retail store. There are plenty of options if you put your mind to it.
So if you are not measuring your marketing effectiveness, put some systems in place today and get started. It can be as simple as a “tick sheet” that key staff can use to record: source of leads, types of leads and then retrospectively record if they convert to a sale. Or it could be a more complex Point of Sale or Customer Relationship Management system. You can use different phone numbers in your advertising, try different offers through different mediums and to different targets, and by tracking responses and actual sales you’ll slowly but surely reveal what marketing successes you are having, and what marketing money is misspent. Measuring your marketing effectiveness gives you critical insights that you can act on to benefit the health of your brand.
Measuring the ROI on your marketing (source of customers, cost of acquisition etc) alongside measuring your brand awareness is the key. Just because you are small doesn’t mean you can’t have big ambitions from a brand perspective. So start measuring what matters and watch your brand grow – literally!