How Successful is Your Marketing?

The marketing space is very crowded so it is more challenging to be heard and stand out. This makes it even more important to measure the performance of your marketing to confirm your efforts are effective. Keep reading for our tips on a basic set of marketing performance measures.

New Client Acquisition

Let’s get started by confirming how new clients find your business. This needs to be a question asked on phone calls and tours. It’s great if you can document this in your POS system, but if not create a tally sheet and have your team input the source of new client referrals into excel every week.

Use this data to calculate your cost per lead. Take the amount of money you spend for each marketing source and divide by the number of new leads for the month or quarter. The data won’t be exact, but will highlight resources that are underperforming with very few mentions over six months. Consider reallocating these marketing dollars to other sources.

One of the most important, but frequently overlooked measures is conversion rate. How frequently do prospect inquiries result in new clients? You may need to track this manually, but it is key to determining how well you and your team are selling the value of your services.

Your marketing dollars are wasted each time you lose a conversion. Customer service and sales training can help you increase your conversion rate. This investment will let you reduce your marketing budget long-term.

Client & Email List Size

Every business requires a client base of support so knowing the number of active clients (used services within last 12 months) to meet your occupancy goals is very valuable. Every business loses clients for a variety of reasons so understanding your client turnover, new client acquisition rates and total actives provides insight on next steps in reaching your revenue goals.

Instead of spending money to acquire new clients you may be able to target inactives with a specific email campaign inviting them back. Worst case you may find out some have moved or get feedback on customer service opportunities that will improve retention going forward.

As Robin mentioned in last week’s post segmenting clients is a much more effective marketing tactic than general marketing blasts. During slow seasons for your various services create a campaign with a special offer targeting clients that use the service or invite those that have not tried it do so.

Website Performance

Your business website is an important marketing tool and should have a specific call to action. What do you want visitors on your site to do?

Pet care services is a relationship and trust-based business so we recommend that your call to action be a phone call that is answered immediately. Don’t let prospects call the next business on their list!

You do need to monitor how well your website is doing it’s job converting visitors to your call to action. You should have Google Analytics installed and perform a regular review of performance. Digital marketing firms can assist you with the technical set-up and report interpretation and is money well spent.

You will learn important data about your client demographics that helps you target your marketing to that audience and save money long-term. You can also monitor source of visitors, conversions, web page visits and bounce rates. All of this data helps you make changes to your website so it is an effective marketing tool.

Social Media Networking Insights

Social media is an important aspect of digital marketing today. It can be challenging to confirm that the time spent with social media has value to your business. Use the insight tools available in each social media platform to prioritize your time investment.

Review the demographics and compare to your website and client base looking for consistencies. Also look at overall engagement actions like shares or likes on specific post types and between platforms.

These are just a starter list of key performance indicators (KPI) that will help you have confidence you are spending your marketing dollars and time wisely. It’s a noisy space and most small businesses don’t have the marketing budgets to compete in volume of messaging so make sure the messages you are sending are converting to revenue for your business.

Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Starter List

• Source of Client Referrals
  • Cost per Lead
  • Conversion Rate: Prospects to Clients (email campaign, phone calls, tours)
• Client & Email List Size
  • Prospects
  • Inactive Clients
  • Clients by Segment
• Website Performance (Google Analytics)
  • Client Demographics
  • Source of Leads
  • Conversions: Website Call to Action
  • Webpage Visits & Bounce Rates
• Social Networking Insights
  • Client Demographics
  • Engagement: Shares, Likes