What You Should and Shouldn’t Measure in Your Marketing
What To Measure?
Peter Drucker, who developed many of the core tenets of contemporary business management, famously penned: “What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.”
Should you measure everything in your marketing?
Yes and No
Reports on rank changes for SEO, keyword analysis for Google Ads, performance of email marketing and even website traffic. These reports are crucial to demonstrate the effectiveness of the programs and our work.
Reports help our clients measure specific items, with the goal of driving more revenue at the lowest cost. This is then compared to the investment, and that leads to a Return On Investment (ROI), which is a key measure of the performance of a marketing program.
Some marketing tools achieve a huge ROI, such as email marketing, which the Direct Marketing Association estimates at $42 of sales generated for each dollar invested. Other tools typically lead to positive ROI with a broad range. Sometimes the ROI is negative, perhaps because it was for a test of a campaign, that in theory was to achieve results, but it did not. This testing is typical of a healthy and comprehensive marketing program.
Every digital program has data that is measurable, but if you look at that data alone, it may not give you the full picture.
Why?
Because the reality is that business growth is a combination of all your marketing efforts, not an individual tool or channel.
Did a client decide to work with you because you had a great Facebook post? Or was it the white paper on the website, or maybe it was the networking meeting? Or it could be the online review or that brilliant article in your email newsletter.
Each of those touchpoints were instrumental in convincing that business owner that YOUR business was the right one for her.
Did the Facebook program have a measurable, high ROI? Or was it finding your website on page 1 of Google? Hard to tell.
Did all your marketing initiatives help paint a positive picture of your business and increase the prospect’s perception of how it will be to work with you? Yes!
New business is the result of several synergistic activities of a well-rounded marketing program.
So yes, you should look at the data. But combine that data across multiple channels to get a full view of your marketing impact.