Tracking
your Marketing
ROI
By Susan Young, President, AimFire Marketing
April 2006
You
probably remember the old industry cliché: "I know half of my
advertising is wasted. I just wish I knew which half." In
traditional advertising, such as television or radio spots, it
is much more difficult to track the results of a particular
campaign. But despite this saying, there are now numerous ways
that we can track marketing campaigns to determine what's
working and what's not working. Are you implementing any of
them currently?
Here
are a few ways you can track your marketing activities now:
1)
Incorporate
a coupon code for special offers or discounts.
When you utilize a promotional tactic such as a coupon or
discount off a product or service, include an alpha-numeric code
that your customers must mention to get your discount. When your
customer redeems the coupon, keep track of all coupon codes in a
spreadsheet or other sales tracking software.
2)
Start
recording lead sources.
Your call center, sales force and website are all great tools
for keeping track of lead sources. Make sure that your customer
service staff and salespeople ask all prospects and inbound
callers this simple question: "How did you hear about us?"
and have a system in place for recording this data. You can also
ask for this information on your website information request
form. When you add a new person to your database, note from
where this lead came. Remember, you should track where the lead
originated but also multiple responses from specific campaigns.
3)
Track
your website visitors. One
of the simplest ways you can start tracking marketing activity
now is through your current website. Most hosting providers
offer tracking programs, but if you're not sure what tracking
program you have, be sure to ask your hosting provider for a
login and password to view your tracking data. Some of the
important statistics you'll want to track include: a) unique
visitors (ignore page hits) b) referring sites (how people are
finding you from other sites, including search engines and
spiders c) keyword search phrases d) entry, exit and visitor
paths. Analyzing these statistics at least monthly will help you
see whether your marketing campaigns were effective, which pages
of your site are under-performing, and even why visitors are
leaving your site, so you can adjust accordingly. If your
current provider is not offering website tracking, or you'd
like a more sophisticated website tracking program, software
such as WebTrends
can supplement your existing offering.
4)
Use Internet landing
pages. Whether you're doing banner advertising,
eNewsletter advertising or search engine advertising, you should
be using a unique landing page with a unique URL for each
campaign. This is a simple, yet effective way to track how many
people are responding to your ad, and also a great way to tailor
a page of your website that reinforces and provides additional
information to the marketing message for your campaign. You can
also use variations of a landing page to test specific
conversion rates.
5)
Track
your email marketing campaigns. If
you're sending out an e-newsletter or doing email marketing,
and use a professional email software provider (which I strongly
recommend), you should automatically receive extensive tracking
data on who has opened your email, as well as who has clicked on
specific links within your email. This is a great tool for your
sales team because it allows them to see who is most interested
in which products or services. Make sure your next email
campaign is not simply long paragraphs of text but consists of
teaser paragraphs with links back to your website or other
articles posted on your website.
These
are just a few examples of how you can begin calculating your
marketing ROI. Even if you have a small marketing budget, it's
easy to see that you can still find ways to track the results of
your efforts. Doing so will help you focus on the marketing
campaigns that perform the best and earn the highest revenue for
your business.
Susan
Young is president of Aim Fire Marketing, an Indianapolis-area
marketing, public relations and website strategies firm that
works with growing companies to implement effective marketing
programs. You can contact Susan and learn more about Aim Fire
Marketing by visiting www.aimfiremarketing.com.
Copyright - Aim Fire Marketing. You can reprint this
article on your website or newsletter by including this and the
above paragraph.
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