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(How) Do You Measure Your Marketing Effectiveness?

Mark Parent August 3, 2017 3:00:00 PM EDT

Inbound Marketing Measurement & Analytics

(How) Do You Measure Your Marketing Effectiveness?

Just because you build it doesn't mean that prospects will come. In this case, we're not talking about a baseball diamond, but about your marketing strategy.

Marketing effectiveness is never something you can assume. Testing, measuring, and verifying data is the only way to know that you're on the right track. If you continue to devise marketing strategies based on supposition, you run the risk of flushing your marketing spend down the proverbial toilet.

Tracking Results in Real Time

Marketing effectiveness The road to higher sales is paved with effective measurement.

Writing for Entrepreneur magazine, marketing expert Jim Joseph stresses that businesses can't afford to wait until the end of the month, quarter, or year to collect and review marketing data. It needs to happen on a daily basis. As soon as you gather data, analyze it to determine your progress. That way, you can make small changes and adjustments to your strategy — which might mean better ROI.

According to Joseph, businesses must incorporate metrics and analytics into their marketing plans. In other words, these two facets of your businesses shouldn't exist in vacuums; they need to work together. It starts with creating a system that allows you to measure data from the very beginning.

Inbound Marketing Is the Easiest Campaign to Measure

If you're going to measure your marketing effectiveness, you need a strategy that lends itself to metrics. Traditional, outbound marketing won't cut it. You can't determine down to each individual viewer and customer whether a television commercial or radio spot produced positive ROI. The same goes for any form of traditional advertising.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is inherently measurable as long as you have the right tools in place. From content marketing to email marketing, to social media advertising, you'll know down to the click how each strategy performs.

Once you set up an inbound marketing campaign, however, you have to track the results. Which strategies garnered the highest ROI? How has your target demographic responded? You can also conduct A/B testing. For instance, you might try two separate landing pages to find out which design performs the best.

Inspiration Requires Validation

A great idea isn't worth much until you can prove it works.

Many businesses run exclusively on inspiration. Management teams feel fueled by creativity and assume that their brilliant ideas will pan out. But that does not necessarily happen. Even great ideas sometimes fall flat — especially in a rapidly changing field like digital marketing.

Analytics tools, such as those available from Hubspot, allow you to view data down to the most granular level. From the number of interactions you receive on social media to the open rate for your email marketing campaign, you'll know whether to stick with an idea or to kick it to the curb.

There are multiple ways to measure marketing effectiveness. Technology has birthed sophisticated tools that yield impressive amounts of data when wielded properly. If you're not sure whether your marketing strategy has created positive ROI for your company, get a free inbound marketing assessment. We can be the difference-maker for your business.