Once you’ve done all the work to get your strategies launched and meet your customers where they are, you need to know if it’s working, right? Just as you did for marketing to current clients, you’ll want to make sure you’re tracking and measuring the right things for marketing to prospects. In order to create trackable metrics, first go back to your high-level business and marketing goals. You’ll want to match the metrics with your goals.
For example, if your business goal is to focus on a niche, and your marketing goal is to bring in 50% more customers in that niche this year, there are a variety of metrics you can look at to help you understand if your strategies and tactics are on track.
Some examples:
- What was the engagement on the niche-focused content you wrote? How many blog page visits? Comments?
- Did people share this content on social media?
- How many new leads did you bring in?
You can also put metrics together to help you determine your next steps. For example: Let’s say our blog pages have good traffic, people stay on the page a long time—which means they’re reading—but the pages have a high bounce rate (people who visit one page and leave that page without venturing further into your site). That could mean that they’re getting content they like but they don’t know where to go and what to do after.
In this case, we may need to do a better job of providing calls to action in the form of clear links to related posts, more value driven e-books or white papers, or an easy-to-find ‘Contact Us’ form.
Marketing is about adjusting and changing, so know your plan is flexible. It’s a blueprint, but it’s not set in stone. You should review your progress, make decisions on what works and what doesn’t, and adjust from there. The more you revisit and refine, the more your efforts will produce the results you want.
