An integral part of a business's marketing plan is the evaluation process. Evaluation allows the business to review and make adjustments where necessary. Importantly, it helps to determine the business's success and profitability or conversely, its failure and re-evaluation process.
A very important metric in evaluation for start-up businesses is determining which portion of the marketing budget is reaching the target audience directly. With the changes in how marketing is done, a number of new metrics have emerged to help you to determine if the right audience is being reached, if not, why not and what other tools may be engaged to achieve your marketing goals.
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| Image courtesy of massdot.com |
Here are a few terms to associate yourself with:
Engagement: a term more popularly used just before a couple marries; now, very much associated with the number of likes, shares, reposts etc., that your social media posts receives.
Insights: a social media tool which provides demographic information on who is reading your online posts. Insights define information by gender, age, location and interests. Insights also defines your posts' engagements by the number of likes, shares and mentions.
Google Analytics: Google analytics allows you to see where your traffic is coming from and how visitors interact with your website. You can track the responses to different social campaigns and see which are more successful at moving users to and throughout your site, as well as tracking specific conversions.
Conversions: a marketing tactic that encourages a customer to take a specific action. For example, in e-commerce, conversion marketing is the phrase used to describe the act of converting a customer who browses your website to a paying customer.
Feedback collection: Whether this is done online or offline, feedback, particularly from customer is a critical tool in determining the impact of your marketing plan on the customer. Is the customer receiving information about your company and from where; is integral moving forward. Are the methods being used the ones from which the customer retrieves information?
Leads generated: Lead generation is the life blood of any business, regardless of type, age or size. The business's ability to convert leads into actual business also speaks volumes. It could be the product being offered, it could also be the influence of another user or the combination of marketing methods that makes the business attractive. Whatever it is, lead generation feeds into the ultimate success of your marketing programme.
Subscriptions: an increase or decrease in subscriptions to your business is a definite tell-tale sign as to whether or not your marketing plan is working.
Thought Leadership: Is your business respected within the industry that you operate? Are you or your business a point of reference for expert opinion? Believe it or not the perception of your business by those within and outside of your industry counts, and although this may not be quantifiable, there is a popular saying "image is everything"!
Next time, we will look at evaluating your offline metrics.
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