Understanding whether your marketing is hitting the mark is crucial for a company’s growth and sustainability. However, many small and medium-sized businesses struggle with evaluating the effectiveness of their efforts.

The foundation for any worthwhile analysis is a set of clear, measurable marketing objectives, which are aligned with your overall business goals.

Whether you are seeking to increase brand awareness, generate leads or boost sales, having specific targets is essential. And once your aims are defined, selecting key performance indicators will allow you to track progress.

Utilising web analytics

Tools like Google Analytics are essential for understanding your online performance through monitoring of key metrics such as:

Traffic sources: Knowing where your visitors are coming from – including organic search, social media and referrals – helps you understand which channels are most effective.
Engagement rate: This measures the percentage of visitors who interact with a piece of content, such as clicking a link or spending a significant amount of time on the site. Google defines the engagement rate as the number of engaged sessions divided by the total number of sessions in a given period.
Session duration: The amount of time visitors spend on your site can signal the relevance your content.
Conversion rates: Tracking the percentage of visitors who complete desired actions – such as making a purchase or filling out a form – helps chart success.

Analysing social media metrics

Social media platforms have their own analytics tools to help you gauge performance and refine your approach to better connect with your target audience.

Key metrics include:

Engagement: Track likes, shares, comments, and follower growth to measure how well your content resonates with your audience.
Reach and impressions: Understand how many people see your content and how often they see it.

Measuring content marketing effectiveness

Content marketing is about creating valuable, relevant content to attract and engage your audience. To measure its effectiveness, consider:

Time on page: Longer time spent on a page usually indicates that visitors find the content engaging.
Social shares: High numbers of shares can amplify your reach and signal content quality.
Backlinks: When other websites link to your content, it not only drives traffic but also improves your search engine ranking.

Email marketing metrics

Email marketing remains a powerful tool for nurturing leads and driving sales. Key metrics to monitor include:

Open rates: High open rates indicate compelling subject lines and relevance to your audience.
Click-through rates: The percentage of recipients who click on links within your email is a measure of how engaging your content is.
Conversion rates: Ultimately, how many of your email recipients take a desired action, for instance making a purchase, is a critical metric.

Tracking paid advertising performance

Paid advertising, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, can be a significant investment. To ensure you’re getting a good return on ad spend you should regularly review and adjust campaigns based on measures such as:

Click-through rates: These indicate how well your ads are capturing interest.
Cost per click: This can help you manage your budget by understanding the cost of each click.
Return on Advertising Spend: This measures the revenue generated for every pound spent on advertising.

Using customer feedback and surveys

Direct feedback from your customers can provide valuable insights into your marketing effectiveness. Consider using:

Customer satisfaction surveys to gauge how happy customers are with your products or services.
Net Promoter Score: This measures customer loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend your business to others.

Implementing marketing attribution models

Marketing attribution is the process of determining which interactions influence a customer to purchase from your brand — it lets you know which route a customer took to your products.

With this information, marketers can identify which campaigns or channels drive the most conversions. If you’ve ever been asked how you heard about an online store, you’ve been part of marketing attribution.

Using this kind of approach also helps marketing teams determine how to target campaigns to reach more high-converting customers or to retarget existing customers for additional purchases.

Marketing attribution helps align marketing and sales data at all stages of the sales funnel — from initial lead qualification through to conversion.

Sales data integration

Connecting your marketing efforts to actual sales data helps create a picture of their impact. Customer relationship management tools help track interactions and sales conversions, enabling you to see which marketing activities are driving revenue.

Competitor analysis

Keeping an eye on your competitors can provide insights into market trends and areas where you can improve. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs allow you to analyse competitor performance and identify opportunities.

Understanding your brand share of voice

Share of voice is a measure of the market your brand owns compared to your competitors. It acts as a gauge for your brand visibility and how much you dominate the conversation in your industry. The more market share you have, the greater popularity and authority you likely have amongst users and prospective customers.

While SOV is typically understood to relate to a brand’s share of paid advertising in a competitive marketplace, it can be defined more broadly to include, for example, mentions on social media and traffic for certain keywords.

Measuring your brand’s share of voice helps you see the bigger picture and where your brand fits into it. It adds context to your performance data, allowing you to pinpoint opportunities for growth and improvement.

Calculating your marketing efficiency ratio

Marketing efficiency ratio measures how well your marketing strategy or campaign performs holistically. It’s used to work out how lucrative marketing efforts are as a whole – in other words, how much money a marketer spends to get results.

MER is a calculation that examines total ad spend and total revenue. The higher your marketing efficiency rate, the more results your marketing efforts generate with fewer marketing pounds.

It might sound like Return on Advertising Spend but there’s a difference.

ROAS measures how much money you make for every pound spent on ads, helping you attribute efficiency to specific ad campaigns and channels. MER, on the other hand, considers the total effects of all your marketing efforts.

It mitigates, for instance, flaws in attribution during the customer journey – say someone clicks on a PPC ad and visits your online store but only makes a purchase from your store after being prompted by a radio advert for your business a few weeks later. ROAS might assume the PPC ad was the touchpoint that resulted in the purchase without considering the radio ad. MER forgets attribution and focuses on the overall efficiency of your marketing budget.

You can also use MER for brand building and awareness rather than concentrating all your marketing assets on conversion-based ad campaigns.

How do you know if your marketing is working?