Measure Marketing Effectiveness for Business Growth

Author: Rachel Durkan, Paradigm Marketing & Design

When it comes to marketing, most small businesses take the approach of throwing something against the wall to see what sticks. Or even worse, they try something once and if they don’t see immediate results, they give up. What many don’t realize is it takes 9 - 13 touches to reach their audience, rendering the wing-it approach virtually useless.

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To truly reap the rewards from your marketing efforts, you need a funnel system that strategically orchestrates multiple touches across the lead nurturing spectrum, measuring as you go.  Think of it like an auditorium. You’ve got the space with hundreds of seats, a stage and powerful AV system—and you’ve got something important to say. But if no one knows you’re there, you’ll be speaking to an empty room. Before you can impart your wisdom, you need to first fill the seats (build brand awareness). Once you’ve got a captive audience, you need to give them compelling reasons to stay (engage through multiple touch points in your funnel), all while constantly reading the room to see if you’re getting through (measure).

The problem is, many businesses aren’t taking this approach—not in its entirety. In fact, up to 65% have not even identified or attempted to measure their sales funnel, which is staggering considering nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.  Implementing a marketing program alone is not enough. You absolutely need to be measuring its effectiveness. If you neglect your funnel, you’ll miss out on a huge revenue opportunity.  In my experience, there are two reasons why businesses aren’t measuring: they fear they’ll only call attention to their marketing fails or they think it’s too complicated to do.  Good news—neither is true.

Metrics support profitable decision-making 

The most successful marketers are those who unapologetically assess their marketing efforts on an ongoing basis to see what’s working and what’s not. They rely on the data to tell a compelling story about where they’ve been, where they are today and where they need to go.  Yes, when you do this you may discover that a particular marketing program underperformed. That’s okay—even expected at times. Use those insights to redirect you to a more profitable and successful marketing program—not to point out your “failures.” It’s not a linear process, but rather an evolution in your approach as you nurture your customer along their journey to the point of purchase.

Measuring marketing performance doesn’t have to be hard

It’s true—measuring marketing performance isn’t as cut and dry as measuring your sales team’s performance. In fact, it might take a customer anywhere from 3 - 12 months to go through the entire funnel before purchasing (sometimes longer). But, don’t let that deter you. While you may not be able to attribute a particular marketing effort to the ultimate sale, you can measure your brand awareness and ROI through each stage of your customer journey by way of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

For example, you can measure your brand by looking at how you’re doing on social media. Track things like follower growth, reach, referrals and engagement. Also examine your website metrics. How many page views are you generating and what’s the average user’s time-on-site? If your traffic is increasing (both new and existing users) and users are staying on your site longer, then you’re doing a good job building your brand.

​To measure direct ROI, look at metrics like social media conversion, the number of webinar registrants, downloadable content conversions, email open rates, etc. These metrics are relatively black-and-white and should be fairly easy to capture. More importantly, they reveal a wealth of information that can guide your marketing decisions moving forward.
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The truth is, to really understand how well you’re reaching your audience, you need to measure throughout the entire customer journey. But be sure to set goals. Identify the metrics you want to achieve across every touch point and monitor as you go. By tracking your efforts as you go, you’ll end up with a powerful funnel that delivers a shorter sales cycle and ultimately supports revenue growth.