New Year, New Goals: Measuring Marketing Metrics & Success
We are now at the end of our New Year, New Goals series and I think one of the most important parts of the process – measuring your marketing metrics and success.
Catch upon the past posts if you need a refresher:
This is a vital part because these metrics give you a benchmark to measure your success by or how to identify areas to improve on. If you don’t know what works versus doesn’t work for your business, how can you grow and evolve to meet the needs of your clients?
Marketing Measurement Tools
Now that you have you SMART goals set, resources set up and activity plan with specific milestones, we need to set up measurement strategies. If your goal is via an online medium such as a website or social media, there are many innate reporting functions and programs. For website analytics, this website offers some great suggestions that are free and low cost: http://articles.bplans.com/the-top-10-tools-for-tracking-your-web-metrics/. For social media analytics, try some of these free or low cost tools, Twitter Analytics, Hootsuite reporting, Facebook Insights, Tweetreach, Social Sprout, LinkedIn metrics, Symosos or Radian6.
If you are tracking sales or inventory as the measurements of your goal, you can use your accounting or inventory tracking system and check the reports at your milestone times.
Sticking to Your Milestones
Whatever you use as a measurement method, ensure you put it in place and understand how it works before your campaign begins. Then have a check in on it at your milestone checkpoints. However, this is often easier said than done – life happens and tracking progress always falls to the bottom of the to do list. KEEP IT A PRIORITY! Some clients put reminders in their calendar, schedule the time in ahead of time, use post-its around the office as reminders or simply have it written down on a calendar. Do whatever you need to do to keep it as a priority on your task list. This is the time where you look at your original SMART goals and evaluate your progress to date. If you are on course, then great! If not, how can you adjust course to ensure you achieve your goals?
Celebrate at Each Milestone
Not every milestone will warrant celebration, of course but progress is progress! The path toward any goal will have setbacks; maybe your social media engagement skyrockets until March and then plateaus, or your new advertising strategy brings in new business in the summer but not the autumn. If your benchmarks have been well-crafted, you will be able to celebrate these indications of a need for improvement as well as you do the times when you’ve met your goals.
Opportunities to re-evaluate your methods and goals are valuable! Maybe you’ll be able to bring in a new team member or contractor with a new idea, or maybe you’ll have an opportunity to re-engage with your target market in a way that helps you discover new ways to be a unique service in your community. Or maybe you won’t add something, but can take away something that hasn’t been working so you can rededicate your energies and resources to other paths. Treat these moments opportunities for growth rather than as failures to achieve, and you can maintain your motivation throughout the year!
Happy planning! Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about setting SMART goals, creating resource or activity plans or simply how to market your business. We are here to help!
