Why measuring your marketing efforts is essential for small business growth

Without a strong marketing strategy with clear goals and objectives, you risk spending a lot of time on marketing activities that just won’t work. A strategy helps to keep you on course and make sure that you are not getting sidetracked or losing momentum. It also keeps you accountable and stops you from wasting time and money.

However, simply executing your marketing plan is only half the story.  To truly optimise your efforts and achieve the greatest return on investment, it is critical to measure the results and effectiveness of your marketing activities. 

Measuring marketing effectiveness is important for several reasons. Firstly, it allows you to see which marketing activities are working and are generating the greatest return on your investment. This will allow you to allocate resources more effectively for the activities that are most likely to generate revenue. You can also stop wasting time and money on activities that are ineffective.

Secondly, by measuring marketing effectiveness you will be able to work out how you can improve your marketing strategy over time. When you understand what is working and what isn’t you can optimise your campaigns to make them more effective. You could for example change your messaging, refine your targeting or adjust the channels that you have been using to reach your audience.  

Lastly, measuring marketing effectiveness allows you to make data-driven decisions. You’re not just going with your gut and hoping for the best. Instead, you are looking at key metrics and performance indicators and using hard evidence to improve your marketing strategy.

This is why it is extremely important to set clear goals and benchmarks for your marketing activities. Without these, it can be difficult to measure your progress.

So, how do you go about measuring the effectiveness of your marketing activities? There are several key metrics and key performance indicators that you can use to track and evaluate the success of your marketing activities. These depend on the platforms that you’re using. 

Let’s explore some of the most important metrics you should be tracking for your small business.

By tracking and assessing the success of your email marketing campaigns you will begin to get to know your audience better and therefore amend your campaign based on the findings. Close analysis will reveal the kind of content that your subscribers enjoy and engage with the most. It will show you which images they find most attractive, and which links they are clicking on. Once you know this you can send them more similar content. 

Email marketing metrics to track:

Email open rate – What percentage of your subscribers are opening the emails that you send? How does this compare to the industry standard? How does it compare to your own average open rate? 

Email forwards – Are your subscribers forwarding the emails that you send to them to other people? 

Click rate – How many people who receive your emails are clicking the links in them? People only click links that genuinely interest them so this can be used as a measure of engagement. Make sure you track which links people are clicking on and the number of clicks per link. 

Unsubscribes – There will always be people who decide to unsubscribe from your mailing list and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, if you start hemorrhaging subscribers this could indicate a problem.  

Pretty much everything is now trackable on social media. The difficult part is actually working out what is worth tracking. For example, if you are a local bricks and mortar business, you should be looking to build a local following, so your overall follower count is unlikely to grow huge. If you are a service business who works internationally, follower count may carry more weight. You really need to work out what is important for your business.

Social Media metrics to track:

Reach – This is important because it will show you how many people are seeing your social media posts. 

Impressions – This is the number of times your social media post was seen. This number will be higher than reach as there will be people who will look at your content more than once. If the impressions are significantly higher than the reach, that means people are looking at the post more than once so try to work out what it is that people are coming back for. 

Follower count – When you track this you will be able to ascertain your audience growth rate over time.

Engagement rate – This will show you to what extent people are engaging with your content (likes, saves, shares and comments. Before you start to feel glum about your poor engagement rate, it is worth noting that in 2023, all the main social media platforms have an average engagement rate of less than 1%, apart from TikTok which is just under 6%. 

Your website is one of the most important tools you have to market to your audience and tracking the right metrics will allow you to see how well your website is performing or if indeed it is underperforming. You can track the success of your website by using tools such as Google Analytics, which will give you valuable insights into its effectiveness. 

Website metrics to track

Page views – This shows the number of times a page on your website has been seen by a visitor.  

Time on page – this will show you how long a visitor stays on a page on your website. A prolonged time on page could indicate that the content is engaging and has value. The average time spent on page across all industries in 2021 was 54 seconds.

Bounce rate – This represents the percentage of visitors who enter your website and then leave straight away without viewing other pages within your website.

New visitors Vs Returning Visitors – This will show you the percentage of your website visitors who return to your site. This is important as it allows you to measure how effective your website is at building and retaining an audience. It helps you to demonstrate the value of your content marketing efforts. However, you cannot necessarily use this metric as your sole measure of customer loyalty. It depends entirely on your business and whether you sell something that people want to invest in regularly. 

Traffic sources – It is also important to track and measure where your website traffic is coming from. This allows you to tell which of your marketing activities are driving the most traffic to your website. If the majority comes from search engines, you’re probably doing a great job at SEO. If it’s coming from social media, you likely have an engaged and interested social media following. If it’s coming from referrals you may be excelling at building relationships with other organisations or perhaps your PR campaigns are bringing results. If the traffic is coming direct, you have done a great job of building brand awareness across all your platforms. 

Conversions – A conversion happens when a website visitor take the action that you want them to take. That could be buying something, but it could also be contact you or signing up to your newsletter for example. To calculate your conversion rate, if your analytics doesn’t show you this, you can take the number of actions completed in a given time frame, divided by the total number of visitors in that same period, multiplied by 100 to get a percentage. Your conversion rate will vary by industry and demographic etc, but as a general rule an average conversion rate for an e-commerce site is between 2 and 5%. 

SEO is how you get traffic to your website from search engines like Google and Bing. So it is really important to prioritise SEO on our website to make sure that you are moving up the rankings and being found online. Tracking your SEO metrics will allow you to determine the success of your digital marketing efforts.  

SEO metrics to track

Keyword average rankings – If you are doing SEO work you should be tracking your keyword average rankings to make sure that they are improving. 

Keyword search volume – Tracking keyword search volume is important because there is no point optimizing a website for keywords that nobody is searching for or for ones that are extremely competitive. 

Referring domains – getting authoritative backlinks from other websites is a particularly important part of your link building strategy. Securing more backlinks from referring domains will increase your domain authority. You should aim to have more referring domains than your competitors, just make sure they are from quality sources and were gained organically.

Organic traffic – This is a measure of all the traffic that you are getting from search engines. If this metric is moving in the right direction, this is a good sign. 

If you divide the total cost of your marketing activity by the number of new customers that you gained, you can work out how much it costs you to acquire each new customer. Tracking your CPA will allow you to identify which marketing activities are most efficient and budget accordingly.

This metric lets you track how much revenue you have generated over the lifetime of a customer. This will help you to choose how much you should invest in which activities to generate the best long-term value. 

It is always a good idea to go straight to your customers and ask for their feedback regarding your marketing activities. By sending out surveys and asking for feedback you can check which activities are resonating most and whether you can improve your messaging.

Measuring marketing effectiveness is an essential component of your marketing activities. This is what will allow you to understand which activities are working, how to make your marketing more effective and how to ensure the greatest return on investment across all your platforms. Without tracking and measuring your efforts you are taking a gamble and risk wasting a lot of time, effort, and money. Using data-driven evidence to inform your marketing strategy is the key to success. 

If you’re looking to embrace a more proactive, strategy-driven approach to your marketing perhaps we can help. We Make Media is a Devon-based web design company and we’ve been helping small businesses grow in the West Country since 2010. If you need advice for your small business marketing strategy, we would be happy to discuss what you’re looking for and how we can help. Book your free discovery call.