Are you currently evaluating your marketing? Many entrepreneurs are scared by numbers and as a result never review their marketing activity, but if you don’t evaluate your marketing you could be wasting your time and money.

Evaluating your marketing is key to understand what is working and what isn’t working. That information will help you to make informed marketing decisions going forward as well as ensuring you are using your time, energy and money as productively as possible.

Hopefully, you already know it is important to evaluate your marketing so I’m going to walk you through how you can evaluate your marketing for yourself.

STEP 1 – DECIDE WHAT YOU NEED TO EVALUATE

To get started you need to decide what needs to be evaluated.

The first thing you should be evaluating is your progress to your marketing goals. If you haven’t already set goals then find out how to set your goals in ‘Why you need to set marketing goals for your business’.

The second thing you should be evaluating is each channel your are marketing your business via. Write down all of the channels that you are using to market your business. Some options include:

• Website / Blog
• Email
• Podcast
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Facebook Ads
• Google Ads
• Webinars
• Live Workshops
• Speaking opportunities
• Guest blogs

 

STEP 2 – DECIDE HOW YOU WILL EVALUATE EACH MARKETING ELEMENT

Once you worked out what needs to be evaluated, you need to establish how you are going to evaluate them.

 

Website

When it comes to evaluating your website there are so many metrics you could review and I have already written a post sharing the ‘7 Google Analytics Metrics Every Website Owner Should Review’. However, the main things to concentrate on would be on where is your traffic coming from (this is your way of analysing if all your driving traffic activity is working or not). Then if you have sales pages you can work out your conversion rate of purchase (if a service/product that can be bought online) or conversion rate of leads (if you require people to apply by application or book a call with you).

 

Email

If you are actively trying to build your email list then you should be reviewing your mailing list number. Then you should also be looking at the open rate of emails and the click-through rate (CTR).

 

Blog

When evaluating the performance of your blog you can review the dwell time to work out if people are consuming all of your posts or losing interest. You can also review how people are finding your blog and what action they are taking on a blog post (since all of your blog posts should have a call to action).

 

YouTube

As you would expect from Google, YouTube offers people a wide range of analytics. However, in this instance where you are focusing on it being a marketing tool the emphasis should be on audience retention (what % of your videos are people watching?) and if you use cards to get people to take action then you can review their performance.

 

Podcast

Due to the nature of podcasts, there is slightly less to evaluate than purely online marketing techniques. You can review your number of downloads and if you share links in podcasts that are only shared on the podcast then you could review the traffic to those links.

 

Social Media

Generally speaking for most social media platforms you can evaluate likes, comments, engagement, shares and how much traffic it has driven to your website or landing page.

 

Paid Advertising

For paid advertising, you should be evaluating the performance of the advert (what % of people are taking the desired action) as well as the cost per click or return on investment.

 

Webinars

There are three stages to evaluate for your webinars: how many people signed up, how many people showed up and how many bought what you were selling in the webinar.

 

Live Workshops / Speaking Opportunities

If you are using live elements in your marketing strategy then you should always include a clear call to action. This could be for them to sign up to work with you 1:1 or to buy a service/product you offer. Or if that isn’t allowed then you should offer them something for free. Ideally, you whatever you are offering you would be able to provide a specific code or bespoke link so you can measure how many people take up the opportunity.

 

Guest Blogs

Depending on the strategy behind you guest blogging you could be trying to raise your profile and / or drive traffic to your website. Again you would use Google Analytics to check how much traffic has been driven and also check the quality of that traffic.

 

STEP 3 – DECIDE HOW OFTEN YOU WILL EVALUATE EACH MARKETING ELEMENT

Once you have decided on your channels and the associated metrics for each channel you have to choose how often. For most digital metrics I recommend once a week, but in some instances once a month will suffice.

 

 

STEP 4 – DO IT

There are no more decisions to make. Now you just have to do it. So put it in your diary or calendar and stick to it. If you decide to do it weekly choose a day when you are normally working so there are no excuses and if you are doing it monthly choose the 1st so it is nice and easy!

 

Did you find this post helpful?. I would love to know in the comments below how often you are going to review your marketing going forward.

 

And if you would prefer to have someone else to review your marketing then get in touch. Whether you book a strategy day or a coaching programme I always start by doing a full audit of your previous marketing activity. This gives you the opportunity to have an expert review everything, pull out the learnings and then use them in your future strategy. I also ensure that going forward you have a clear list of what you should measure so you know your marketing is working.

If that sounds perfect for you then you can find full details of my services here or book a discovery call to talk through the options.