Podcast 62: How do you Know if Your Marketing is Working?

content marketing ethical marketing finding clients marketing podcast Apr 22, 2021

You know you have to market yourself, but do you know if what you’re doing is actually working? You may be holding the marketing busy badge of honour (I certainly have on more than one occasion), but not working on the right things.

There are many different roles your marketing plays. At its core, marketing is about engaging with people and building relationships. It works to maintain the connection with your existing clients and attract new ones. It’s also where you demonstrate how you can help people and share your offers.

Many practitioners jump around from one activity to another and end up feeling frustrated and like nothing works.

If this is you, the reality is, you’re not sticking with anything long enough to know if it worked. You’re just not making the most of your time and effort.

Marketing is a marathon and not a sprint. It will take time to mature and for you to learn whether certain activities work. Discovering this is the key to effective marketing for your holistic business.

How did you hear about me?

This is a magic question to help you understand what marketing is working.

You should be asking every enquiry and every new client you work with how they found out about you.

Track the answers you get, and you will start to build up a picture of where your clients are coming from. This information is priceless and will help you realise what marketing is working, what messages are resonating with your audience, and therefore where to focus your efforts.

What’s the point of the activity?

Who is your marketing for and what is it communicating? Deciding on the goal for your marketing in advance will help you focus your efforts on the right things. If you’re just blasting ‘stuff’ out there, you’ll keep very busy but get very little return on your time.

All marketing should either inspire, educate or entertain the person receiving it. Make sure everything you do falls into one of these categories.

Also, decide what you want people to do next after experiencing your marketing, so you know where to point them e.g., visit your website, book a discovery call, sign up to your email list etc.

I’ll link to an article and podcast 56 in the show notes which is always ask why before doing any marketing for more on this topic.

Understand your analytics

The number of different figures available from all the online platforms can be pretty overwhelming. Tracking everything will become a chore, so keep it simple and identify which marketing activities are working.

Email marketing

Is your email list growing? This can be a slow process especially when you’re starting out – you’ll be celebrating each new subscriber. Seeing growth month on month is a good indication you’re doing something right.

Which emails are getting opened? If you are using an email provider (and if you’re not, you should be), they will give you an overview of how well your emails are doing. Identify which ones have the best open rate which will give you an indication of the topics and subject lines that are popular with your audience. You can then create more content around these subjects.

Which emails are clicked on? Someone taking the time to click on a link in your email is the best indication of interest in you and the work you do.

Social media

Whilst the measures will vary on different platforms, you will find there are similarities.

Followers – don’t look at this in isolation as it will be a vanity measure. You could have thousands of followers but none of them is your ideal clients, especially when you’re still small, many will be family and friends supporting you. Track this number in relation to the other measures.

Reach – how many people see your posts even if they don’t interact with them?

Likes – do people like what you are sharing enough to ‘like’ it?

Clicks – how many people click on your post to go on to do something else?

Shares – are people loving what you do enough to share it with their own connections?

Comments – this is where you communicate directly with the people who are engaging with your posts.

Website traffic

If you are marketing your website on social media etc., you should start to see an increase in the traffic you’re getting to it. Install Google Analytics on your website as it will allow you to see where people discover your website and what they do once they are there.

Google Analytics is also a good way to gauge how good your website is, if the quality is poor, people won’t stick around.

New users – more new visitors show your website is attracting new people and reaching a wider audience.

Bounce rate – this is how many people come to your website and leave before they look at another page. This is the one number you want as low as possible, so be happy to see it go down.

Pages per session – the more pages they look at, the better.

Time on site – the longer people stay, the more engaged they are with your content.

Stop doing the things that aren’t working

Now before you drop anything, make sure you have given it a chance to work. Doing a few social media posts for a week or two isn’t an indication it won’t work for you. You must give your marketing activities time to understand if they work. If you have been doing something consistently for 3-6 months and you haven’t seen any results, it is time to stop and do something different.

Do more of what works

As you start to recognise which activities are working, do more of them. This is using your time and resources wisely on marketing that builds your business.

The Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule demonstrates that 20% of your effort will provide 80% of the results. Identify what that 20% is and focus on doing more of that – or if you have plenty of clients, you can use the extra time you've released in other ways.

Keep measuring

Regularly tracking your numbers will help you to make good decisions about your marketing. I’d suggest making it a monthly review so you can see where your time is best spent. It will also highlight areas you’re neglecting and motivate you to step up there too.

I’ve done this for years on the first of every month using a simple spreadsheet. I can see the trends and importantly the areas that are growing which can be easily missed when you just have your head down and working.

If you struggle to work out what marketing to focus on, book a discovery call with me and find out how I can help you.