One of the key components of a successful marketing strategy is performance tracking. Unless you are able to pin-point the source of every new customer or lead, it is difficult to evaluate the success and ROI of your various campaigns. It comes as no surprise then that enterprise businesses do not shy away from spending thousands of dollars each year on analytics and reporting tools. So how does a small business marketer achieve the same level of tracking precision with little to no budget? Here are a few tips to get started.
Track Different Channels Separately
Your marketing channels are all not the same. The capital investments needed, turnaround time and resources required are all unique for each channel. Investing in SEO often takes months, if not years, to show results. On the other hand, investing in PPC brings instant results although it is not sustainable without a continuous outflow of marketing dollars. Measuring all these different channels under one spreadsheet is likely to show misleading results and it is hence advisable to track these channels separately. Not only this, businesses often deal with different vendors for each of their channels and hence tracking them separately is useful when you decide to oursource your SEO or other marketing operations. The end objective however should be to see the long-term ROI of each channel.
Identify The Right KPIs
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator and refers to the metrics that are critical to moving the needle in the right direction. For a marketer, this could be the number of validated leads, conversion rate, revenues, cancellation rate, etc. One of the most common mistake among marketers is picking the wrong metric to track. Social shares, Facebook followers, time on site are all great metrics to understand user behavior, but they do nothing to grow your business. Using these metrics to track marketing performance could be misleading and could, in turn, lead to an inefficient strategy that does not bring results.
Track Every Visitor
As a marketer, it is extremely vital to know the source of each of your visitors. Marketers are often happy tracking visitors using holistic indices like ‘search traffic’ or ‘direct traffic’. While a growth in search traffic is indicative of good SEO, it does not give you the complete picture and fails to let you analyze which of your SEO strategies contributed to this visitor landing on your website. Thoroughly monitoring the source of each of your visitors will tell you how ‘word of mouth’ reference about your website spread, what caused a specific user or blogger to write about your business and how this caused a visitor to click-through to your website or contributed to an improved search ranking for one of your webpages contributing to that visitor traffic.
Time Value Of Money - Managing Budgeting
Knowing what strategies work alone is sometimes not enough. Many marketers are constrained by limited budgets which dictate how much they could spend on each of their different strategies. One of the reasons for this is a failure in acknowledging the time value of money (TVM). To put it simply, TVM is the idea that the money that you have in hand today has greater value than the same amount of money you are likely to earn at a future date. This is a valuable concept for a marketer while allocating budgets. If you only have $1000 to spend, it is better to invest it in a medium that breaks-even immediately than spending the same money on a strategy that only brings results months down the line.
But having said that, it is also important to pit this against the lifetime expense of a strategy. While PPC brings results immediately, the costs are likely to continue escalating over time. SEO on the other hand has a worse TVM compared to PPC, but is likely to have lower lifetime expense. It is important to benchmark these channels against each other while deciding the share of marketing budget each of them should receive.