Is Your Marketing Actually Working? Here’s How to Tell

As business owners, marketing is one of the key activities for business growth. But do you really know how to tell if your online marketing is working for you? The most important aspect with any type of marketing is figuring out how to go about getting a good return on investment (ROI) from your online marketing. This is really the only way to determine what kind of marketing works best for you.

Ways to Market Online (a.k.a. Digital Marketing)

There are all kinds of ways for you to market online:

• Facebook ads
• Instagram Ads
• Pay-per-click (paid search)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing
• Content marketing
• Etc., etc.

You get the picture – there are a lot of online marketing options and you can use one or all of them. But to know which ones to use, you need to know if what’s working. You want a return on your investment.

ROI is something that we strive for in business, in marketing, and sales. If we’re going to spend any time or money, you’re going to need to figure out if that’s getting you anything back. If you’re not getting a return on your investment, then you probably should be spending your time or your money on other things. Yes, traditional marketing & networking are still great ways to do business. They just don’t scale really well, or have the ROI potential of digital marketing.

Figuring out Return on Investment

To understand return on investment, you have things to figure out and think about first:

• Where are you starting from?
• What are you trying to accomplish?
• What is your goal?
• What are you willing to invest?

So, to break that down a little more, you need to get a baseline. If you’re starting from zero, great. You know your baseline. If you’re not starting from zero, that’s also great, but you have to get some data before you get started. You have to understand where you’re starting from. It’s hard to measure if you don’t know where you started. Things you want to know:

• How many followers do you currently have?
• How many visitors is your website getting?
• Have you done any marketing in the past?
• What was the result of past marketing efforts?

Goals, They Aren’t Just For Sports

The other important step before getting started is to figure out what your goal is. This can be tricky. This can be tricky because Facebook ads, just as an example, offer you lots of different goals. Your goals may change over time. Your goals may change as your business grows.

What are you trying to accomplish by spending this time or money? Are you trying to get more people on your list? Are you trying to get them to opt into an offer? Are you trying to get them to buy? What is your objective? Be very specific about goals, because otherwise, again, it’s hard to measure the return on your investment.

How Much To Spend

Finally, you have to figure out what are you willing to invest? Right now, it is a low barrier to entry to start investing a lot of time into online marketing. You can do all of your own Facebook ads. It’s not rocket science, people. You can absolutely do it yourself. There are some fantastic resource out there to teach you.

You can do your own Instagram ads. You can do your own pay-per-click marketing. All of the information’s out there available to you. Are you willing to invest the time or would you rather invest the money? It becomes a business decision at this point.

Is it better to invest your time, increase your expertise, get to know it, and do it a little bit? Is your time more valuable spent other places, providing the services in your business or working on other marketing activities, and you can pay somebody money and get this off the ground faster and perhaps get a better return on your investment?  Again, you have to figure out what you’re willing to invest. You can’t get started for free, you’ve got to put in the time or the money.

Educated Guesses… You Need to Test

I wish that there was a marketing crystal ball. I wish that there was something that would tell us from the beginning what people are going to react to. We get lots of good indicators – if you know who your audience is and you know what’s worked before and you have some messages, you’re at a good starting place. Even the best fictional marketer on the planet, Don Draper, went with his intuition. It didn’t always work. We, as marketers, have to test and test and test and iterate and iterate. Measuring is so critical to helping us figure out what’s working and what’s not working. And where the investment gets the best return.

Once you know what your goal is and what your baseline is, then you need to be checking in. You don’t really want to just put one Facebook ad out in the world, and go, “Mm, I hope it works.” You have the opportunity to do a whole campaign with different ads (start with at least 3) and within hours, (sometimes minutes), you’ll know which ones working better than others. Sometimes, the campaign we think will be great might fall flat on its face. In the case of failure, pull that ad, put another one out there. One’s going to resonate. You just have to keep trying.

TL;DR Checklist for Online Marketing ROI

Here’s a quick checklist for you:

• Figure out your baseline – you can use Google Analytics for this, and social media platforms all have analytics. Familiarize yourself with you’re your at before you begin.
• Define your goal – whether it’s growing a list or selling more of a product, know what you want to accomplish.
• Determine you’re target investment – Is it time or money? Will you learn to do it yourself or hire someone?
• Check the analytics and insights. Educate yourself about what you should be looking for and be prepared to change strategies.
• Adjust accordingly – Celebrate (fund) what works, change what doesn’t work and be willing to be flexible.

Now you know how to gauge your online marketing ROI and can make it work for you to help your business grow!