How do you evaluate your marketing efforts?

John Wanamaker (advertising guru of the late 19^th century) was famous for saying, “Half my advertising is a waste, I just wish I knew which half”.  For the better part of a century this quote was thought to be a truism in marketing.  A lot has changed since John Wanamaker's days. Marketing and advertising is also quite different than the way Mad Men portray the business. 

In fact a quick look at Google Analytics shows you exactly which efforts were effective… right?  Well maybe not… exactly. 

As modern marketers, we have a lot of data at our fingertips, and I love data.  But data alone won’t cut it.  Many organizations still struggle to make sense of that data and to integrate the web data with sales results. At the end of the day, many marketing budgets are still planned based on a bit of data and a lot of guessing. 

Can you relate to the ongoing need to do marketing planning based on a little data and a lot of gut feeling? If you wish you could be leveraging the value in your website data, and easily evaluate all your marketing efforts, then you're on to something.

If on the other hand you don’t track web data at all… now is the time.  Google Analytics is a free and very powerful web tool that is a must for any site. Even if you don’t plan on using that data today, start gathering it now, you’ll be glad that you did.  If you’ve been gathering data for sometime but that data fails to really provide the information you need to evaluate your marketing efforts, then you're not alone.

It’s time to pull together your marketing tracking and sales data. For many years I had an active social media presence, blogged weekly and sent monthly newsletters to clients and prospects.  The more active I was in the social space the more website traffic I generate to my site, and that felt great, but I really didn’t know anything more than that.  I didn’t know, if the quality of the site traffic was all the same?  How many visitors became sales leads? How many leads did I convert to customers?

Times have changed, tools have evolved and now I can see the effectiveness of all my marketing efforts in one dashboard.  I know that not all traffic is equal and that more traffic isn’t the measure of effective marketing, it’s all about more conversions.  If you’re ready to leave the guesswork behind and begin evaluating your marketing efforts, let’s start the conversation.  

Let's start with a free Inbound Marketing Assessment.