This is the main question everyone is looking for the answer how to know whether your marketing efforts are paying off or not. There are times when it is easy to see that your marketing efforts are producing the results that you want for your small business, such as when there is a surge in orders immediately following the launch of a certain campaign.
However, there are other times when you might be wondering about the effectiveness of your day-to-day marketing strategies. Are all of those posts that you make to your business’s social media accounts being seen? Is your website user-friendly enough to make it easy to navigate through all of your promotional materials?
The world of marketing can be a tricky one, especially for those who are new to the concept. You try to make as much headway as possible in building a strong online presence and effective campaigns, but how do you really know if you are getting anywhere? Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to discover if your marketing efforts are paying off or not.
Reporting
Reporting is a tough topic for even the more experienced marketers out there. This is because there isn’t really a clear-cut way of simply generating a report for all of your marketing efforts. Marketing is performed across a variety of sites using various tactics, so in order to produce an accurate report, you must do so by taking all of those things into account.
Although a tedious and difficult process at times, there are ways of creating accurate reports that can give you a good picture of how effective your marketing efforts are. You will want to identify and account for your key performance indicators, structure the report appropriately, and use certain reporting tools. If you are confused at all about how to approach reporting for your marketing efforts, this guide will help.
Conduct a Survey
Sometimes the best way to know if your marketing efforts are generating the results that you are after, the best thing that you can do is to conduct a survey so that you can ask your target demographic directly. Surveys can be a valuable tool for discovering particular information that you would not otherwise be able to get a clear picture of via a generated report.
Another great aspect of surveys is that generally speaking, they don’t cost very much to conduct. You can send a survey out to your existing customers to inquire about particular aspects of marketing or simply to discover how they heard about your business in the first place. If a significant amount of people indicate that they initially heard about you via a certain aspect of your marketing strategy, then you know that you are on the right track.
Communicate with Sales
You will be able to learn quite a bit about how effective your marketing strategies are by communicating with your sales department. They are in the field interacting with customers, so they will have a clearer picture of how those customers learned about your business. The feedback that you get from your sales team might just prove to be invaluable.
