Proving That Your Marketing Is Working

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor

It’s hard to prove the worth of any marketing tactic. Especially in a world where businesses run multiple different campaigns at the same time, there are rarely instances where you can point to a specific strategy and say, “This tactic will lead to this many sales.”

So, it can be hard taking what your marketing has done and proving the value it’s brought to a client or your business. Unless you can clearly point to a sudden increase in sales due to your marketing, it’s likely they might just think they are throwing their money down the drain. Especially since good marketing takes time to work, being able to pinpoint and explain successes is an important skill for digital marketers to have. Here are some important areas to focus for tracking your successes and proving that your marketing is actually working:

Breaking Down What It Takes to Make a Sale
A useful approach to tracking your progress is determining how much of a particular data set you have goes into securing a single sale.

To figure this out, look at how many sales you made in a single month. Then, take whatever analytics you want and divide it by the number of sales you made. For example, let’s say you made 100 sales and the general traffic for that month was 15,000. That means that in order to make a single sale, you have to get 150 visits on your website.

Now, this isn’t an exact science or exactly true, but it can give you a long-term scale to measure your improvements. Applying it with multiple different analytics can show the process to improving your marketing and can give a breakdown of how much goes into producing a sale.

Improvements in Rankings
A clear sign of a flourishing digital marketing strategy is ranking on relevant keywords for your business. Getting on the first page of results for relevant searches is a clear success and brings  a lot of value to the table.

Having a way to track those rankings needs to be a priority when it comes to reporting your results. There are plenty of tools to help track this for your business and keep you up to date, and then you can take that data to better inform how your marketing is doing.

If you are focusing and doing good digital marketing, you will start ranking for relevant terms. This is especially true if you do proper keyword research and know which terms are reachable while still having good value.

Reviews, Followers, and Happy Customers
Anytime you get a positive review, it’s like a gold star for your business and your marketing. Most people don’t go through the time and effort to give a review for just an average business — only those that are absolutely terrible or wonderful. These reviews can often be some of the most valuable assets your company can get, with many consumers valuing online reviews the same as personal recommendations from friends.

All of that starts with the company’s marketing. The more positive reviews you gather over time, the better you know your marketing is doing. You aren’t overselling or misleading your audience; you’re setting the right expectation and then the product impresses them enough to take the effort to write up a review.

Along the same line, people only follow brands and products they like on social media. So, as you have to prove the worth of your marketing, one source of validation is how many real followers you have online. These are people who want to see more digital marketing from your business. The better the content you produce, the more followers you’ll have that want more of the same.

Having a General Upwards Trend
One of the biggest signs that your marketing is working is simply that your numbers are going up in a general trend. There can be dips and boosts month to month, but as long as data like your site’s traffic, total number of leads you are gathering, and your sales are improving overtime, you know something is working.

The key, then, is trying to narrow down what is working and what isn’t. Since most digital marketing tactics are long term, that means analyzing when you were doing specific tactics, take the data from those months, and compare them to a base line. Don’t just compare how many visitors you’ve received straight across each month, but analyze things like the rate of growth and whether those changes had impacts on quality of leads and sales.

Unseen and Undefined Values
Some values to a company are incredibly important but very hard to put a dollar amount to. For example, a lot of the ROI for a non-ecommerce service based company is more about building meaningful relationships with long-term clients than getting a flood of short-term clients. Marketing plays a role in this happening but isn’t the only factor.

Other values, like public awareness/relations are things very difficult to measure short of running massive surveys. These type of things are influenced and can be improved by marketing, but it is hard to prove how effective they are.

The Importance of Measuring Your Results
It is essential that good marketers use data to measure their results and prove what is working for them. Failing to do this can lead a business to pursue poor strategies and even potentially alienate your target market. Use data to improve your marketing and find new potential customers.

It’s only by evaluating our work and examining what we did right or wrong can marketing hope to improve. Being an ignorant marketer is just asking for trouble, so take time and analyze what your data is telling you. Then, invest your resources into strategies that have been proven to work and see your successes grow.
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