Strategies to Measure your Startup’s Marketing Effectiveness

Once you enter the world of entrepreneurs, you will need to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses just like yours. And, to gain a competitive advantage, you need to promote your business online. However, this may seem simpler than it really is. Namely, creating a website, setting up an email marketing campaign, being present on social networks, and investing in SEO and PPC is not enough if you don’t measure the effectiveness of these practices.

After all, the beauty of digital marketing lies in the fact that, everything you do can be measured, right?

Here are a few steps you need to take when assessing your startup’s marketing effectiveness.

Ask your Customers for Opinion

How satisfied are your customers with your customer services? Do your products solve their problems? Why do they abandon your site without making a purchase? How often do they delete your emails without even opening them? What about your content- how relevant and digestible is it?

These are all questions you need to answer when determining the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign. And, one of the most effective ways to understand the why and the how behind your customers’ purchasing decisions is to ask them all this directly.

Namely, we’re living in the era of super-simple and affordable online surveys that allow you to collect your customers’ feedback effortlessly and save both your time and money.

Start by asking your customers to review your site and products. Don’t get frustrated with the bad publicity you may come across. On the contrary, use it to improve your services and tailor them to your customers’ expectations.

You can also conduct polls on social networks, send surveys via emails, or even post them on your site. This process will humanize your brand, facilitate your communication with your consumers, and allow you to collect all the data needed.

The only problem with this form of research is that people don’t take it seriously. Sometimes, they will answer the questions randomly, out of sheer boredom. To make sure they give you honest and accurate answers, maybe you should set up paid surveys. This is one of the most popular micro-jobs people do to make some extra cash online and, knowing that they will get compensated only if their answers meet your expectations, they will take them seriously.

Listen to your Customers

Surveys are great, but sometimes, they’re too narrow. To understand what your target audience feels about your brand, customer services, and products, you need to listen to them carefully. And, social networks may serve as an awesome starting point.

You can use social media monitoring tools like Talkwalker, Topsy, Hootsuite, or Mention to get notified whenever someone mentions your brand or product name on social networks. This way, you will be able to see people’s discussions about you and see what they (don’t) like about you.

Alternatively, this is a practical way to engage in conversation and provide your customers with the real-time feedback they didn’t expect.

Analyze your Social Media Strategies

Social media marketing has become the foundation of every killer digital marketing strategy. Now, even though the majority of companies are already using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram, it seems that they still don’t understand the importance of these channels. Namely, statistics tell us that 87% of marketers are not sure what their most profitable social media tactics are.

Even if they decide to track the effectiveness of their social media channels, they usually focus on the number of their followers, likes, shares, and comments. Now, these metrics do tell you something about your customers’ engagement, but they cannot really show you how profitable your social media strategies are.

On the contrary, you should focus on some more actionable and relevant KPIs, including:

• The social share of voice- tells you what percentage of social media mentions within your niche is about your brand, compared to your rivals.
• The engagement rate includes a plethora of KPIs, such as the bounce rate, the conversion rate, the applause rate and the amplification rate. By keeping track of these metrics regularly, you will know how engaging and relevant your social media content really is.
• The audience size includes metrics like the audience growth rate, a new follower rate, and the follower ratio. As its mere name says, it tells you whether your social media community grows as expected.

Keep Track of your Email Campaigns

No matter what they say, email marketing is still alive and kicking. It gives you the opportunity to offer a personalized and highly targeted user experience. However, to make your email marketing campaigns profitable, you need to keep track of the right metrics.

Start with the metrics like the open rate, click-through rates, and the conversion rate to see how well your emails resonate with your target audience. Don’t forget to track the growth of your email list and the unsubscribe rates. This way, you will understand what email strategies work or don’t work for your recipients and be able to adjust your content and approach to their needs.

Measure your Conversion Rates

To guide your customers through each stage of your sales funnel towards making a purchase, you need to optimize your site’s pages properly. And, to do so, you first need to know what pages are generating stellar traffic and conversions to your site and which ones are underperforming.

Pay attention to the bounce rate, which shows you the number of users who have abandoned your site before taking any further action. Don’t focus on your homepage only. On the contrary, you should dig deeper to figure out at what stage of your sales funnel people start abandoning your site and why. Is it because of poor loading time? Maybe the content on certain pages doesn’t answer their questions or your site is not responsive enough?

The next KPI you need to stay on top of is the click-through rate, expressed in percentages, which shows how many times links on your pages were clicked, compared to the total number of page views. You can measure the CTR of your CTA buttons, links on a landing page, Facebook display ads, PPC ads, or any on-site element, such as images, headlines, etc. To gain the competitive advantage, you need to see how your CTR stacks up against your competitors’.

Finally, you need to pay attention to the average session duration that shows you the average time your visitors spend on your site. It shows you how interesting your content is to them, as well as how optimized your website is.

Over to You

Startups and small businesses usually think that it’s all about opening a few business accounts on social networks, sending a bunch of emails, and leveraging SEO and PPC. Unfortunately, that’s not true.

To use digital marketing to grow your startup, you need to measure its performance regularly. This way, you will not only get an insight into the performance of your online presence, but also make better, data-oriented decisions and tailor your digital marketing campaigns to your customers’ expectations.

Raul is the editor in chief at Technivorz blog. He has a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.