Evaluating Your Success
Evaluating the success of your digital marketing efforts is essential for determining if you are meeting your goals and have built a marketing strategy that is effective and efficient. This analysis will also help identify areas for improvement.
Fortunately, evaluating the success of your effort is not difficult. It will require obtaining customer feedback and reviewing your platform’s assessment features — Performance Analytics — to assist you with this task. Together these will help you identify what is working well and areas for improvement, providing useful information for refining your digital marketing strategy. Importantly, obtaining and evaluating your customers’ feedback and assessing your analytics should be done frequently when starting off, at least quarterly and annually once established. Doing so will enable you to adapt what you are doing if needed before spending too much time on aspects that may not be working as you had intended. This, in turn, will help to improve the success of your digital marketing efforts.
customer feedback
Engaging with your customers is valuable for all kinds of reasons including providing a direct measure of whether your digital marketing efforts are paying off. Talk with your customers about how they found you, what products they like and/or are willing to try and additional information they would like about your business. You can also gather this information with a poll on social media, or by sending out a survey to your email/SMS subscribers list. Use their responses to help evaluate whether your digital marketing strategy is helping you gain customers (not just followers) and ways you might improve it.
Example: You’ve been using an email newsletter to provide weekly updates to your customers about what you’re selling and when via your off-the-boat sales. You’ve been wondering how to make this more effective and thus decide to poll your customers. You create a four question survey to send out through your email list asking: 1) How they found out about your off-the-boat sales, 2) What species they’re most interested in purchasing from you, 3) How helpful the email newsletter is for updating them about your sales (on a scale of 1-10), and 4) What suggestions they have for improving the newsletter and/or how you communicate with them about product availability. You send this out to your subscribers and incentivize them to respond by saying you’ll pick a respondent at random to receive a free fish from you. Their responses will help improve the usefulness of your newsletter and increase your understanding about ways to reach new customers and what products your customers are most interested in purchasing from you.
Reviewing Performance Analytics
Platforms often have built-in “analytics” or data about how your content and account are performing. Analytics will let you track things like the number of followers you’re gaining and losing, what posts receive the most engagement and if certain days/times are better to reach your audience. They will also give you information about your audience including who they are — typically giving you the age and gender breakdown — and their general location. This information will help you evaluate how effectively you are reaching your goals, including reaching your intended audience and identifying ways to refine your digital marketing strategy.
Example: You developed a website on the Square platform to increase your local off-the-boat and restaurant sales. Your website allows people to place orders with you on Monday before you go fishing on Wednesday. To get the word out about your website and your business, you developed a flyer about how to order directly from you via your website and you post this at a few local establishments and hand it out to local seafood restaurants. To determine whether your efforts have increased the number of people looking at your website you review your website analytics. Because you are using the Square website platform you have built in analytics that you can review. You review the analytics and see that more people have been viewing your website since the date you posted your flyers. You also look at the analytics to see where the people who are viewing your website are from and determine they’re primarily local, who you were trying to reach. Based on these analytics, you expect your sales will increase. If this does not happen, you can wait a bit longer or evaluate and adjust your strategy. Otherwise enjoy your increased sales.
Resources
5 Keys To Making Your Business Thrive on Facebook
Entrepreneur.
Facebook Marketing for Small Business: What You Need to Know
Social Media Marketing Society.
SCORE Association.
Social Media and YOU: The Benefits! (PDF)
Web Success Team.
Social Networks as Online Marketing Tools: New Trends in Social Media
Webbed Marketing.