Determining Marketing Effectiveness Even If You Didn't Track
In a perfect world, you would track marketing data in order to determine the effectiveness of your marketing. But what if that’s not possible? What if you don’t track any data at all (which is more common than most people think)?
The good news is that there are many ways to determine your marketing effectiveness even without data - seven, in fact! This blog will explore those ways and how they can help. We hope it helps you get a sense for how to determine whether or not you're effective without ever having tracked anything.
This post was written by our friends at NetLine Digital Marketing "Your Full Service Digital Marketing Agency. We hope that you enjoy this article and find it helpful. You can read the original post here: http://www.netlinedigitalmarketing.com/blog/determining-marketing-effectiveness-even-if-you-didnt-track/
In a perfect world, you would track marketing data in order to determine the effectiveness of your marketing. But what if that’s not possible? What if you don’t track any data at all (which is more common than most people think)?
The good news is that there are many ways to determine your marketing effectiveness even without data - seven, in fact! This blog will explore those ways and how they can help. We hope it helps you get a sense for how to determine whether or not you're effective without ever having tracked anything.
1. Ask your business partners for feedback
One of the most powerful ways to evaluate your marketing is simply to ask your business partners for feedback on how well you’re doing. We don’t mean just asking if everything is going well or if the traffic level is acceptable. You need to get them talking about specific customers and their success stories or failures - real information that can be meaningful and actionable. In addition, ask how they view your flexibility and service in general, so you can see how well you are meeting their needs.
2. Focus on performance by channel
When we were first developing our marketing strategy, we knew that even without tracking, discovering which channel was performing best would be helpful. We determined that our best performing channel was web. To determine how well traditional or digital media channels performed in comparison, we asked a few different partners. The results were remarkably consistent: the difference between digital and print media was negligible, with digital being slightly more effective for some partners and print being slightly less effective for others.
It’s important to note that this data is anecdotal rather than any kind of scientific data source - it’s simply the feedback from people who have used our software. Your results will vary depending on the strength of your particular channel and type of business. However, what we found was that, by talking to people who had used the software and asking specific questions about the effectiveness of the channel for their business, it was possible to determine which channels were performing best. This was insightful even without tracking!
3. Understand where you’re getting traffic from
If in addition to asking your partners for feedback, you also track all traffic sources (which is just a matter of keeping a list with every website that sends you traffic), you can get insight into why some channels work well and others have zero impact. Maybe your low-performing channel sent you traffic from the wrong source and that is why it’s not performing well. You can also see which channels are clearly driving massive traffic but sending you little.
4. Focus on performance by customer segment
You can also get a good idea of which customers are responding well to your marketing efforts simply by looking at demographic data - in particular, by focusing on segments where demand is high and you’re able to meet it with reasonable prices. Let’s say you have a business that depends mostly on residential customers, but still needs to offer commercial services for them as well. In that case, you would get some insight into which customers are over- or under-consuming your service.
5. Monitor the success of your marketing efforts
The next step would be to measure and track the number of new customers you acquire through your marketing efforts each month - but you don’t need to track it in order to do this. You could simply look at whether or not it’s profitable for you - does every new customer bring in more revenue than it costs? The important point is that this is a clear, objective way to measure performance without having to know anything about what’s happening from a specific customer perspective.
6. Consider the value of your marketing efforts
Another way to evaluate your marketing without tracking is to look at the potential value of those efforts. You can do this by simply asking yourself: How much money could I make if I used this channel to its fullest capacity? What kind of revenue or what kind of growth would this allow me? (This is why segmenting data can be valuable - you can look at high-value segments in order to ask what additional revenues they might allow you. In fact, we recommend that you keep a list of all segments that could potentially be valuable and track them periodically as a way to measure the success or failure of your marketing.)
7. Look at the results of other software programs
In order to really get a sense for how effective your marketing is without data, you need to look at the results from other programs and compare them with yours. You should compare the average lead volume per channel. For example, if an identical marketing campaign performed better on one channel than another, it’s important to know why that might be. It could be because the channel is better at attracting business, or it could be that the marketing strategies used on one channel are simply more effective than those used on the other.
In Conclusion
Now that you’ve read through our list, you probably have a good idea of which method will work best for your particular situation. You might even have few other ideas in mind! The key is to experiment a little and see what works best for your company.
So go ahead and take action without worrying about actually tracking results! You might be surprised at what you learn. If you have any additional ideas or insight about this topic, we would love to hear from you.
Conclusion
We've just explored the best ways to use marketing data without tracking in order to make marketing more effective. Of course, since there is no such thing as a truly "un-trackable" strategy, there are always tradeoffs between efficiency and accuracy. There is no single best strategy for all businesses, so it's important for each business to make the most out of each approach that is most appropriate for it.
Section Opening Image: Flickr/Brendan Murray - Nuns hanging out in front of a bakery; Envato MarketFeeder
Section Summary: Data without tracking provides valuable information about potential customers without having to know any private information about them.