How Do You Know If Your Marketing Is Working?

It's the ever-elusive question. Is our Marketing working?

There are many factors that impact the success of Marketing efforts, and it's often hard to know whether performance is the result of marketing, sales efforts, the economy, growth you would have gotten anyway, etc. With so many moving parts, and often limited resources, it's understandable how Marketing has a hard time justifying investments. In addition, those investments that seem like "great ideas" can often result in less-than-stellar outcomes. Here's a few perspectives to ensure your Marketing works for you:

1) Remember, it's not a one-to-one relationship.
A single campaign or effort, even if well crafted, can fall flat on it's face. Why? Remember that every communication lives within an environment, and each element of that environment contributes to the experience. If you have a direct mail piece driving people to your website, is there a logical, concise path AND call-to-action? Do you capture information and have scheduled follow ups? Your marketing efforts should function as a system, not a series of individual activities.

2) It's not a "one-and-done".
Too many organizations get caught up in the belief that "if we build it, they will come". Whether it's a microsite, app or even your website, you have to continually generate reasons to return. Selling online? Integrate offers, informational articles, and instructional videos via Social Media to drive traffic. Got an app you want people to utilize? Integrate geo-location based alerts to promote specials and discounts to drive timely and relevant calls-to-action. Your online presences are living, breathing and continually adapting mechanisms to actively engage your audiences.

3) You can't reach a goal without one.
What do you want to accomplish? More subscribers? More sales leads? It can be intimidating to establish a goal that you fear you might not reach. The key is to build it across a clear timeline, with "check in" milestones to ensure you're trajectory is on target. This measurement will allow you to adjust tactics if you start to plateau, and more easily identify those elements of the initiative that are unsuccessful or not resonating.

4) There's no way to improve without a baseline.
Where are you now? If you want to launch a Marketing campaign to generate leads, what's your current average in the same time frame? If you want to drive more traffic to your website, how many unique visitors do you have today? These baselines help you articulate not only what you want to accomplish, but also how much you moved the needle. You can't call it a Marketing success if your initiative can't outperform the baseline - it simply reinforces a negative perception that Marketing has no impact.

5) Separate awareness from conversion.
This is often a big stumbling block for Marketing departments. If you're looking to generate awareness of your company or product in a specific market, conversion metrics are not your measure of success - they are a bonus. Start by identifying the market perceptions today, and define what you want to change. Tools including online opinion surveys, social media mentions, and qualitative interviews all help generate visibility to success of your efforts. More importantly, awareness initiative success is much slower moving than conversion campaigns. You're trying to shift opinions and perceptions, rather than simply communicating a call-to-action. This takes significantly more time, repetition and most of all, consistency.

6) It starts with a strategy.
Without a clear strategy, your Marketing efforts will start to work in silos. This singular activity diminishes the effectiveness of your investments. The purpose of a strategy is to examine all aspects of your Marketing effort - where you are now, where you want to be, how you want to measure it, what mechanisms you will use, how you will leverage existing investments, and how you will adjust at each milestone. Don't forget that what you do is an investment that has to contribute to the top line of the company. Marketing has to be a good steward of those investments, and that starts with a strategic plan.

Final Thought: Failure is Good.
Though counter-intuitive in Marketing, failure is a good thing that should be embraced. Why? Failures help you build an understanding of what doesn't work. Areas where implementation wasn't quite right. Where the message wasn't resonating. When campaign timing was off. No matter what the issue, you have a solid road map to avoid the same potholes in the future. Embrace your failures, or you're doomed to repeat them. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to keep an open mind and never stop learning.

Just keep calm and carry on, Marketers.