This is the bit where The Body Coach asks you to get out a tape measure and record the size of each thigh, in order to track how many inches have dropped off (or been added to) said thighs during the course of your exercise regime. Exciting isn’t it?
In marketing, of course, we measure ourselves in terms of the reactions that we are getting from our audience. These reactions are the indicators of our audience’s desire to progress through the customer buying journey and they help us to identify whether the marketing activities we are putting out there are helping to drive revenue. These indicators might be ‘clicks’, ‘sign-ups’, ‘follows’, purchases or referrals, to name a very few of the potential things you could measure.
For some reason, it’s a part of the process that we (as both health improvers and business owners) attempt to resist. Tracking success in terms of hard numbers, as opposed to the more anecdotal feedback of a prospect saying ‘I like your advert’, should be rewarding. To see progress, to have a clear undeniable statistic to show that you are succeeding in your mission, that’s the good stuff! But, in real life, measuring marketing is a bit daunting, and scary.
There are three reasons why I think we resist measurement, and I’m going to try to break down all of them for you today (hey – it’s good to be ambitious, no?).
The reasons are:
- Fear – of seeing how bad the current situation is or of having to ‘officially’ record a failure in a particular marketing (or diet) activity.
- Confusion over which numbers one should be tracking, and how to find them.
- Lack of time – it’s all too time-consuming and arduous.
1. Fear
Personally, we identify with this – who doesn’t step on the scales on January 2nd, eyes shut, slowly prising them open, terrified to see just how bad the damage is?
Unfortunately, you just have to grit your teeth and own the situation as it is. Firstly, don’t let the size of your list, or the number of Instagram followers you have, be a measure of how successful you are (see last week’s blog post on List Building for more reassurance on this point).
Secondly, you need this information to work out if what you are doing so far is working. So, just like a nerve-wrangling trip to the dentist, it simply has to be done and, who knows, it might even be okay. Give yourself a kick up the butt and face the music.
Okay, tough love DONE.
2. Confusion
This one is much easier to handle. We recommend building up the stats that you are measuring slowly and over time. Track first one or two things and once you’ve got the process for keeping them up to date embedded, add in a few more.
How about identifying the marketing activities that you are relying on at each stage of the customer buying journey (more info about what this is here) and choosing one or two measures for each stage? In this way, you can see where you have a bottleneck or roadblock, and whether any of your activities aren’t delivering the value to your audience that you had hoped for.
So, for ‘awareness’, you could choose to track the number of social media followers you have, for example. For ‘interest’, visitors to one of your cornerstone content pages. For ‘evaluation’, you could track visitors to your pricing page. For ‘trial’, perhaps the number of discovery calls you are holding. I’m sure you get the idea – these are just examples from a whole raft of things you could select.
If you need help to figure these out, why not take a look at one of our free resources – 34 Marketing Measurements To Keep Your Business On Track – don’t be overwhelmed, it’s more of a pick-list than 34 MUST-Dos! This resource is a free download, no email address required, so it’s well worth getting yourself a copy.
3. Lack of time
There’s no argument from us, tracking stats is time-consuming, but the benefits outweigh the time spent, especially if you use shortcuts.
Here are the steps we would work through to make the process as painless as possible:
- Identify which stats you want to measure
- Decide the frequency that works best in your business – daily, weekly or monthly. What you go for will depend on the lead time for your products or services. The longer the lead time, the less frequently you need to check your numbers.
- Set up a spreadsheet recording your baseline figures (i.e. what they are now) and a column for each month (or day, or week) going forward.
- Find out where and how to extract the data – for help doing this, you might find this blog post helpful. Anything that’s not covered here can be sussed out via YouTube tutorials, or ask us.
- Put a reminder in your diary on a regular basis to spend half an hour going through the numbers and adding them to your spreadsheet. For your own sales numbers you might be able to pull them through from bookkeeping reports automatically.
- To save time on manually finding numbers from places like Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, you could use an app to summarise your results. We recommend Statzy. You can select the stats that you regularly want to track and Statzy will do the rest, updating your results on a daily basis. Statzy also allows you to set up ‘favourites’ of your key stats and shows them for today, the past 7 and past 30 days’ so you can keep an eye on them all the time. Then if you want to export them into your spreadsheet to build up the data over time you can do that too each month.
Tracking this data in your business will make a whole world of difference to you. You might start to realise that no one is reading certain areas of your website, or your regular content. Or that your landing pages aren’t converting at all. Knowledge is power and this sort of knowledge can help to increase sales and reduce lost prospects. Give it a whirl!
Ask us if you need help, we can set up a PowerHour to help you identify which numbers to track and where to find them.
