Skip to main content
Get the latest content delivered straight to your inbox!
Please use your work email
Subscribe

Resources

Your destination for ebooks, guides, articles, and videos on marketing strategy and content experience.

How to Tell if Your Marketing Strategy is Working

Strategy success

When your business started to grow, you created a marketing plan to help it keep moving forward. Now you’re investing time and money putting that plan into action but how do you know if your investment is paying off?

With so many tools available, how do you know which ones will help your ideal customer find your business and choose your products?

Your marketing plan sets out your goals, and your marketing strategy helps you identify ways to achieve them. It should evolve and change, adapting to what works and what doesn’t. Are you unsure where to start or what to look for to see if your marketing strategy is working?

Here are some suggestions for measuring your success.

Ask the right questions

Joanne Sallay is the Director of Teachers on Call, a personalized home tutoring service with more than 25 years of experience.  Teachers on Call’s Ontario-certified teachers specialize in providing one-on-one instruction in all subjects and grades throughout the Greater Toronto Area.

“How do we track our success? It is really simple,” Sallay explains. “We always ask our clients how they heard about us and track this information internally.  This helps direct and shape our marketing strategy.”

In her role as Director, Sallay is responsible for enacting the company’s marketing strategy. Her role includes choosing where to run ads, creating digital content, and overseeing the company’s use of social media.

To keep her strategy in line with her target market’s interests, Sallay knows it’s important to ask the right questions. Keeping track of which parts of your strategy turned page views or clicks into actual sales is a critical tool in measuring the response to your marketing strategy.

Asking your customers how they found your business provides you with valuable data, and you or your employees can easily incorporate this question into online order forms or everyday interactions.

Understand which numbers matter

“It is very easy to get lost in analytics, but measuring the conversion rate of potential clients to actual clients is key,” advises Sallay.

Whether you are advertising in print or using social media to share your message with your fans or followers, you are wasting your time and money if you aren’t seeing results. Set goals for each channel you use and track your success rate with each one, using internal checks or online data.

Keep records and set goals for how much business different marketing tools should be generating and compare them to your existing numbers. Reviewing this data will help you determine the most effective way to turn potential clients into your clients. It will also help you reevaluate your strategy and determine if you should stop using a particular medium or put more effort into another part of your plan that’s achieving great results.

Measure interest directly with original content

Sallay suggests using original content to keep clients interested and engaged with your brand. “In addition to traditional marketing,” she says, “our approach is to engage our clients by creating original content that we share on our blog, social media, and our quarterly newsletter.”

Using original content isn’t just a great way to offer something new and interesting – it also allows you to directly track reactions from potential customers to certain ideas or offerings.

You can measure the number of likes, retweets, and shares you receive and use analytics to see which items generate the most interest and response. You can also see which content encourages users to explore your website and product offerings, and where they look when they visit your site in response to these posts. Link trackers like bit.ly and ow.ly or the services offered by Google Analytics are great ways to see where your content travels and how it’s shared and used.

How do you measure your success? Let us know in the comments below!

Learn how to get the best insights from your content in our latest eBook.