Want to know if your pet business marketing is working? Measure it!

You've tried some public relations, some advertising, a little social media, sent newsletters, implemented contests and giveaways, but are you getting the results you need?

Results and a strong return on investment is what what you want with your marketing activities.

But how do you know if your marketing tactics, individually and collectively, are working?

You need to measure them.

Measuring your marketing program is something every company, large or small, needs to do to see if their marketing activities are working, and to see if they are achieving the strong return on investment to build your brand equity, generate leads and increase sales for your company.

Measuring marketing needs to be a big part of your marketing efforts, just as any marketing tactic you may choose to implement. Integrated into a full marketing plan, measuring activities can tell you if you are utilizing your marketing dollar the most effectively to achieve your goals.

How do you measure marketing? It's one of the questions I get everyday from my clients and my prospective clients.

The reality is there are multiple (and sometimes imperfect) ways to measure most forms of marketing. There isn't any definitive metric for many forms of marketing and no single metric can help you evaluate the effectiveness of all of your spending. Yet, you need to track your progress and hold your marketers accountable.

The overall the methodology of measuring your marketing dollar has three specific steps:

Tracking your marketing activities: 

Track impressions, reach, website visitors and from where they come, open rates, likes, comments, new followers, leads, and more.

Determining your sales cycle: 

Take your sales cycles into consideration. Your sales cycles is the length of time it takes for an individual or company to learn of your company and take action to purchase.

Tracking sales: 

Track your sales.Any sales that results in an increase in income, and identify them from their individual sales channels.

Simply put, once you have these three segments of information you can chart and graph from when an audience learns and engages with you to resulting sales, taking into consideration your sales cycle.

Once you have your data you will need to analyze it to see how your marketing activities (individually and collectively) are impacting your sales and brand awareness. But you need to keep in mind these important factors when analyzing your data:
  • Good marketers know that it takes much more than seven touches for someone to take notice and become a customer. Believing that one touch, one click will result in a sale is flawed.
  • There are many outside factors that can affect your marketing activities including the weather, time of day, the economy, competitors, the quality of your sales reps and marketing team, how your marketing activities are implemented, and more.
  • Multiple influencers can also affect your sales. On average there may be up to six people involved in a decision at a mid-sized company, up to 20 or more people may be involved in a decision in a large company. Remember that different marketing programs may also affect individuals differently.
  • It may only take one day for an individual to see you on Facebook and click through to purchase. And it may take other individuals seeing you up to seven times on Twitter before they are ready to purchase your product. In addition, it may take months to years for you to engage a deal with a retailer that you met at a trade show.
  • It's important to look beyond the "first touch" and seek to measure additional and multiple touches within your marketing measurement program.
  • Larger sales are easier to measure and may be specifically attributed to an individual event. However individual consumer sales can only be measured through trending of your marketing activity measurement.
  • Measuring your company's branding influence and awareness is very different than measuring your company sales. 
It may seem simple, but measuring your marketing in this manner can be a complex and time consuming process, however it is a much needed aspect of your overall marketing program.

What you put in is what you get out. By investing the time and resources into developing a marketing measurement program you increase your ability to market more effectively. Additionally, you will have the knowledge you need to utilize your marketing dollar to it's fullest by selecting and combining individual marketing tactics that work much more effectively for your business, increasing sales, profits, brand awareness and market share.

To learn more about how you can make the best use of your marketing dollar, feel free to contact us for a free 30-minute consultation.

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