Gathering marketing data is a great first step to understanding your target audience and ensuring your campaigns are effective.
However, after gathering data, you’ll need to understand that data by being able to read and evaluate it. Evaluation is key to ensuring you cut out ineffective strategies. That way, you can develop a successful marketing plan that helps your business earn more profits and build its reputation.
Here’s how to effectively evaluate your company’s marketing data.
Sales
Ultimately, you market and advertise your business and its products to increase sales and revenue.
You can use the data you get from your marketing and advertising campaigns to determine whether or not sales are increasing and how much. Additionally, depending on the type of campaign, you can determine your return on investment (ROI). ROI is important because it can help you determine which campaigns are the most successful.
While you may get more sales from one type of campaign, you may also find it costs you more to advertise. That would give you a lower ROI.
In many cases, ROI can tell you how much it costs to acquire customers through one medium. It also indicates how much you’re earning from advertising or marketing. For example, if you advertise on social media, you might have a higher ROI on a certain type of ad or within a certain region.
Check out our six tips to maximize your social media advertising budget.
Customer responses
Customer reactions to campaigns can help you determine customer sentiment as part of your marketing data-gathering efforts.
You can provide your customers with surveys or general customer service feedback forms through email to understand what your customers think of your company and your marketing campaigns.
Simple questions about how customers felt about specific campaigns can help you understand which initiatives are most successful and which customers are making the most purchases.
See our nine tips to improve social listening and gain customer insights.
Reach
Whether you’re implementing search engine optimization, social media marketing, or digital advertising into your overall market strategy, one of your main goals is to increase brand awareness and reach.
Ultimately, you want to reach more people within your target audience who are more likely to purchase from you.
Expanding your marketing reach can help you find new people who may not have heard of your products or services yet. This also grows brand awareness in your current markets.
If you use digital marketing strategies, you can easily measure your reach, but it becomes more difficult when you’re using traditional marketing. For example, if you do a billboard campaign, you won’t have exact numbers on how many people saw the billboard, but you can estimate based on data how many drivers use a particular stretch of highway.
Lead generation
Marketing is supposed to support sales by generating warm leads to give salespeople a higher chance of converting.
While some marketing efforts can lead to direct sales, others do not, especially in the B2B space. Lead generation comes in many forms, including appointments, form submissions, and subscribers to mailing lists.
You can easily track lead generation as part of your marketing data if you’re doing it through your website by counting the number of form submissions.
Additionally, you should always compare that data to sales data to ensure the leads you’re generating are quality leads that purchase at the end of their journey.
While you can’t expect every lead to make a purchase, your lead generation efforts should be increasing overall sales.
Check out our 12 strategies to capture more email leads without annoying everyone, and level up your website pop-up ads with our eight tips to get more leads from them.
Website traffic
Your website is a valuable sales tool, even if people can’t make direct purchases on it.
Building a website can help you generate leads and increase brand awareness, but only if you’re getting website traffic. Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.
For example, whether you do a traditional marketing campaign or a digital marketing campaign, you should see more traffic to your website. This is because effective marketing makes people want to look for you online to learn more about your products and services.
Additionally, all digital marketing strategies should lead back to your website. For example, if you’re doing affiliate marketing, the goal should be to get an influencer’s audience to click on a link that leads them back to your website. If you’re not seeing an increase in traffic, your campaigns are ineffective.
If you’re not sure how much website traffic you’re getting, you can use Google Analytics to learn more.
Check out our eight tips to increase organic traffic to your website.
Testimonials
Testimonials are essential for all marketers. Consumers rely on the opinions of their peers to decide whether or not it’s worth it to purchase from or work with a business.
Of course, testimonials and product reviews can help convince potential customers to trust your business based on others’ feedback.
Learn more about social proof, as well as nine ways to use it in your digital marketing.
Unfortunately, measuring the impact of testimonials can be difficult. However, you can experiment by putting testimonials on different pages of your website and checking your web stats, such as views, clicks, and generated leads to see if adding testimonials has an impact.
Reviews can be easily measured because your customers can provide you with a star rating. That average star rating can tell you how much your customers enjoyed their products. Allow customers to make comments on their reviews to explain why they gave you a certain star rating.
By learning about your customer’s experiences with your product and business, you can find ways to improve both. You also can leverage that knowledge for better marketing initiatives.
See 17 of the best social proof tools to boost your sales.
Customer retention rate
A customer retention rate tells you how many customers you retain over time.
It’s easier and more cost-effective to keep your customers returning rather than constantly finding new ones.
In addition, your retention rate impacts revenue. It also can help you determine which marketing campaigns work best to keep customers coming back. For example, many companies use email marketing to ensure their current customers don’t forget about them.
Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.
In conclusion
Collecting marketing data is important if you want to learn about the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. However, you should always determine the most important statistics to you and your business.
Instead of measuring everything and deciphering tons of data, look at the most important metrics first. This will help you determine which strategies are performing well and which are costing you money.
From there, you can start digging deeper into each campaign. Use marketing data to learn more about how to make them better.
About the author
Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a contributing writer at 365businesstips.com where she shares knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, or financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.
