Starts Here
You probably did research before you bought your last car, looking for things like gas mileage and maintenance costs.
And the last time you picked a restaurant it’s about a 100% probability that you checked Yelp or Google reviews.
A recent study showed that 82% of people standing in a store about to buy something check their phones before pulling the trigger.
It only makes sense that the same principle applies to your own business. But most Small Business Owners have no idea how to find out if their marketing is working.
So where do you GET the information you need to make a good decision? Here are the first 3 places to look to find a scorecard on your website, your emails and your seo.
It Starts with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a FREE software application that uses a code you place on your website in order to track how it’s doing.
If you talk to OwnerMarketingSchool.com, hire a web guy to improve your site or engage a marketing firm to help your sales it’s the first thing they should ask for.
“Let me see your Analytics”
Run if that does not happen.
Here are just the basic questions that Google Analytics can answer:
- How many people visit my website?
- Where do they come from?
- How long do they stay?
- Do they convert?
And it can answer those questions over time.
So you can see if your audience is growing or shrinking.
You can know when your visitors are mostly coming from organic search, or your emails, or referrals – or they’re just typing in your website address.
You can tell which article or post is most important to your visitors because you can measure how long they stay on each page.
If you do it right, you can even tell which pages inspire your visitors to sign up for your email list, become leads or buy your products. That’s the power of the Conversion tracking built into Analytics.
Knowing your analytics gives you the power to do more of what’s working – write more of those articles, use more of the pop-ups, put more videos on your pages – and less of what’s not.
Here’s a quick video to show you what it’s like inside Analytics:
That information is great – but there are some decisions to be made in order to get your customers there in the first place…
EMail Marketing Decisions
Your email list, in many cases, IS your business.
It is literally the only thing that no one can take away from you.
Facebook can delete your business anytime they want to.
Google Ads policies can change anytime.
Your Instagram following? Not really yours – it’s Instagram’s.
And every good email marketing software gives you a scorecard every time you send an email.
Including these 2 basic things you need to know to score and improve your email marketing:
- How many people open your email – as a percentage and a number
- How many people CLICK on your call to action.
The image below is from Mailchimp email marketing software:
This is not attached to an ecommerce product so you’ll see some of the columns are blank. But the basics of Opens and Clicks are there – and will be there in every email software.
Opens is just what sounds like. You’re seeing the % people that opened the email in the image above. If you were able to hover over it live, you would see the number of times it was open instead. That top email was 420 opens, for example.
What it MEASURES is both how compelling was your Subject line and how interested your prospect is in you, your company, or your email.
You can see what a big difference there is between the lowest Open rate at 3.3% and the highest at 23% in the image. What do you think that says about their level of interest in each one?
This is where a lot of entrepreneurs realize they’re email people about what they want to say instead of what the customer wants to hear. (or that they just write crappy subject lines, but that’s another article)
Clicks are how you know how attractive your Offer is to your email list.
Out of the people that opened your email – how many people thought enough of what you wrote to take action.
What % of people clicked the button to Learn More, Read More, Register Here or Buy Now?
If 420 people open your email and you got a 1.1% click rate, that means you appealed enough to 40 people to explore your offer.
Now you can make decisions based on these numbers to improve your email marketing. When you increase the number/% of Opens and Clicks, your business makes more money.
Search Marketing Decisions
SEO or SEM are the marketing businesses buzzwords for matching the content you produce with the words and phrases your potential customers are looking for.
The better you do that, the more your website or video will show up when someone search – and so the better your business will do.
You can use a keyword research tool to see where you rank for the keywords you WANT people to find you for. AND for keywords you actually DO rank for. And an estimate of how easy it will be to move up those ranks.
Now, there are tons of keyword tools. Including a great one embedded into Google Ads if you’re using it. But the one I use is called Mangools (and am an affiliate for) – see the image below. Most of them have a 30 day free trial.
Finding Keywords
The image shows the search results and ranks for “Tampa Commercial Plumber”. As if that was the keyword I was trying to rank for.
As you can see, there are only 10 searches every month. The trend isn’t significant one way or the other and there is a difficult rating of 25, and it’s green.
That means that very few people search for it, but if you WANTED those searchers to find you, you would have a pretty easy job of making that happen.
Over on the right, you’ll see the sites that rank #s 1-10 on Google now, and how easy it might be to take their spot.
Now if getting a commercial plumbing job was a big deal it might be worth it to go after that keyword by making articles and other content using it.
Plumbers Tampa gets over 900% more traffic. But it’s also harder to do.
So the Keyword Finder Tool in Mangools is one place to pull that score card. What do YOU think you should rank for, and how you’re doing with that.
When you click over to SERP Checker you get another look at who your competition is and how easy it will be to unseat them.
[NOTE: If you are not in the top 3 for Google Search results, you’re probably not getting clicks]
There’s More, Of Course
These are just the first 3 ways to measure measure marketing.The more you delve into marketing analytics and improvement over time, the better.
And by better, I mean the more money you’ll make, the closer you’ll be to your goals, the more people you’ll impact with our business.