ow do you measure your marketing successes (or failures)? How do you know if your marketing efforts worked? What’s nice about today’s digital marketing is that we have access to a lot of free data. You must track your marketing efforts and review your data at least monthly. Don’t get nervous. You don’t need a degree in calculus or statistics to understand analytics and insights. I’ll explain everything step by step.

ROI is easier to measure if you do paid digital advertising, which is old-fashioned advertising but online. You can lead a potential customer to a sale by tracking how many clicks the ad received and how many visits to the website it produced. The advertising platform will give you a “key” (a strip of code) to add to your website that will track people from the ad.

According to Megadigital.ai*, the average conversion rate through Google Ads for industrial and commercial businesses is 7.91 percent.

Conversely, if you don’t do paid advertising, that is, market organically, you must work with your own goals and metrics; those are KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs are any measurement that matters to you and your business. KPIs include:

• Sales (obviously)
• Unique visitors – How many people visited your site, not counting multiple or subsequent visits?
• New visitors vs. returning visitors – New folks are great, but returning visitors are better.
• Conversions – Downloading a freebie in return for leaving their name and email address is an example. If you had 100 visitors and 10 downloaded the offer, you have a 10 percent click-through rate. Average click-through rates are 1 to 3 percent. That means you need to attract a lot of traffic and have a great offer of interest to your target audience.
• Page views – How many pages did each visitor view while they were on your site? Likewise, how many visitors did you have to specific pages? For instance, if you’re doing a specific promotion, either paid or organic (non-paid), you want to see how many people visited the page.
• Time spent – How long did they stay on the site? The longer people stay, the better the chances of them doing something.
• Click-through rate (CTR) – This measures how many people clicked on a link. If you had 100 visitors and 10 clicked on a link, you have a 10 percent click-through rate.

Does social media help? Believe it or not, social media helps drive traffic to your website, as well as with SEO. How do you know which network is performing better for you? Or, for that matter, which posts did better than others?

Then, when they got to the website, did they convert? Conversion could mean downloading your special offer, contacting you, or becoming a customer. If not, where did they go? Do they get lost in your website without a clear path to what you want them to do?

• Set up Google Analytics* (GA) – GA is a powerful tool that can give you very deep analytics when set up properly. But it needs to be set up and the code must be added to each page of your website.

If you have a WordPress site, there are free plugins like SEO by Yoast and Google’s Site Kit.

On other platforms, there should be a place in the backend where you can add the GA code in the setup.

GA won’t track anything if the code is not on your pages. In other words, it must be connected to your website.

• Tracking codes (measuring with UTM links) – Google offers a free tool* to track the origin of a visitor. It requires Google Analytics. Use this consistently in your promotional posts on social media and your email marketing campaigns.
• Call to Action (CTA) – Capture leads and grow your email list with intriguing CTAs. The job of good, quality, helpful content is to attract visitors. The job of a good CTA is to convert the visitor into a lead. And these leads are warm, if not hot. They’re interested.
• First, your intake form should get a little more information than just their name and email address (company and phone number may be optional). You can ask them two or three questions to segment your list. For instance, if you offer a coupon with a discount, you can ask if they need the storage unit temporarily or long term. Other pertinent questions could be what type of storage they need and when they need the unit.
• Once you have them on your list, if you haven’t heard from them in a day or two, based on their answers to the questions, send them an email with a video or a link to a pertinent blog article on your site. If they watch the video or go to the link, they’ll receive another email in a day with a different offer. If they don’t click on anything, send them a different email with another video or relevant article. This is marketing automation; all this is set up and tracked by the email program you use, like MailChimp or Constant Contact.

• Follower demographics and statistics – Once you have 100 followers, the networks will provide user stats like age, gender, likes, geographic area, etc. The demographics of your followers must match your target market. Because you’re a local business, serving a local area, if only 7 percent of your 1,000 followers are local, that’s not enough. Sure, it will help with SEO and brand recognition, but is someone in London (unless they’re relocating) going to use your facility regularly?
• Reach – This can mean different things on different networks, and it can be known as impressions. Basically, it’s how many people viewed your post. That means they were logged in and your post (or ad) passed before their eyes in their newsfeed. Good reach helps with brand recognition.
• Engagement – This is what’s important. The more an audience engages with your posts, the more visibility the networks will give you. Did they:
  • Like or react,
  • Share or repost,
  • Comment,
  • Click on a link, and/or
  • Watch the video (the whole thing or just a few seconds)?

What do you do with all this information? Don’t get caught up in all the data. It’s people first. You’re doing all this to build relationships that build trust and credibility. Furthermore, the data will tell you what’s working and not working.

First, set goals with what you want to accomplish in the next 30 days. Go one month at a time. It’s easier to digest. Moreover, it helps you to be flexible and pivot quickly depending on economic and industry trends. For instance, every business that had their 2020 marketing plan all set in December 2019 had to stop and pivot everything (even their businesses) in March 2020.

1. How many people visited your website? If you didn’t have Google Analytics set up before, you don’t have anything to compare it to, and that’s true for a brand-new website. Is the number substantial? Are you happy with it? If not, then you need to blog more and post more. Make sure all your pages are optimized.
2. How long did they stay and how many pages did they view? Obviously, as you put more content on your site, visitors will stay longer.
3. How did the UTM codes do? Which promotions garnered the most clicks? Repeat the ones that worked.
4. How many shares did your posts get? This gives you social amplification or increases your reach. A follower has to like your post enough to share it with their friends and followers.
5. What types of posts did better? Videos, links, or graphics?
6. How many new followers did you get? Obviously, not everyone who starts following you is going to follow you forever. This applies to your email list as well. If they don’t need your services any longer, they’ll unfollow and unsubscribe.
7. Which social networks drove the most traffic to your site? In your analytics, under acquisitions, the search engines are usually first. If you’re new to blogging, it may take a while for Google to notice you, so keep publishing articles several times a week. Next in line will be the social networks. Focus your time and efforts on the ones that brought you the most traffic.
8. Which were your most popular blog articles? Write more of those.
9. You then take all this information and adjust your strategic and tactical marketing plans for the next month. Repeat monthly.
10. Finally, don’t freak out if one metric is down! It’s just one metric. You must look at all your marketing efforts, especially your website traffic and conversion rates. What’s more, don’t forget to take into consideration the seasons.

1. No traffic to your website – If not enough people went to your website, it could be that your message is wrong or it’s reaching the wrong audience. In other words, you don’t know your target market. Consequently, you’re not showing them how you can help them with their problems or pain points.
2. No Conversions – You are getting people to your website, but they are not converting. The problem could be that:
   • The call to action isn’t clear, enticing enough, or obvious to the visitor. What do you want the visitors to do when they land on your website?
   • Your website content isn’t selling your facility. What is your top objective?
   • You’re not attracting the right target for your business or there’s no interest.
   • Your website is ugly and confusing.

Ultimately, your marketing efforts should yield you:

• increased traffic to the website,
• better search engine results page (SERP) rankings,
• increased sales,
• increased following,
• brand awareness, and
• your business goal or objective.

The top 10 reasons why your social media isn’t working are:

1. You didn’t set SMART goals. Goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. That way, you’ll know when you’ve achieved them.
2. You don’t have a strategic marketing plan. Or, if you did write up a plan, it was written years ago and is probably irrelevant now. A strategic plan is a living, breathing document that changes each month.
3. You didn’t create a tactical plan outlining how you’re going to implement the strategic plan. This is like a to-do list of what you’re going to do when and for how long.
4. You are trying to reach a target market that’s too broad. Defining a target market niche is crucial, and you can have more than one target audience. You talk to men differently than you talk to women. The same thing applies to baby boomers or millennials.
5. You didn’t do your research. If your target market is on LinkedIn, why are you spending so much time on Facebook? Maybe it’s the other way around. You must know your target to know where they’re hanging out online.
6. All you are posting are sales pitches. It’s not all about you! Follow the 10-4-1 rule. Out of every 15 posts in any given network, 10 are other people’s content of interest to your target, four are your original blog posts or tips, and one (only one) is a direct sales post. Share; don’t sell!
7. You’re not blogging enough. Ideally, you should blog two to three times a week. The more often you blog, the more traffic you’ll drive to your site if you’re sharing it on social media properly. Your blog should also be set up properly as part of your commercial website.
8. You’re not checking your analytics and insights. These tell you invaluable information about your followers and the types of posts they like and engage with. They will also tell you if you’re reaching the right target. This is especially critical for local businesses.
9. You are not planning. Each month is different. Besides seasons and holidays, you have observance and awareness days that will be trending on social media. Search for the word “trending” on this site to see what will be trending in the current or coming month. I publish an article on my website on the monthly trends toward the end of each month for the next month.
10. You’re not devoting enough time to it. If you’re starting from scratch with little or no following, it takes 90 minutes a day of work over all the networks besides blogging three times a week for 30 days to grow a following. Once a following is built, then you can manage your social media in 30 minutes a day with the free online tools. Yes, it takes some sweat equity, patience, and perseverance, but depending on your business, you should start seeing results in one to three months.

Don’t forget your email marketing reports. If you send out a regular newsletter (at least monthly), you should track the open rate and the click-through rate and look at which links were clicked on the most. You also want to see how many people on your list are actively opening and reading your emails. If you’re sending out the same old emails, you’re probably not going to be very effective.

In conclusion, successful marketing involves creativity as well as research to know your target, your industry’s market, and how best to reach the target(s). If you try and fail, you must analyze where you went wrong.

If it’s working, keep at it! It’s a marathon, not a sprint! If you stop marketing, people will think you fell off the face of the earth!

Either way, when you’re armed with analytics and insights, you can adjust your strategic and tactical marketing plans accordingly for the next month and reach your goals.

• https://megadigital.ai/en/blog/google-ads-benchmarks/
• https://analytics.google.com/
• https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/