The hidden costs of not measuring your marketing are wasted ad spend, missed opportunities and limited growth. Without measurement you cannot tell whether ads reach the right audience or drive bookings and sales. Start by defining goals, mapping the metrics that measure them, then building a report in Google Looker Studio.
If you’re feeling frustrated, confused or overwhelmed with understanding what’s working, or not working in your marketing efforts, trust me when I say, you’re not alone. I see, and work with, so many small business owners feeling this way, and facing the challenge of how to connect their marketing efforts to their bottom line, and conversion (sales, appointment bookings, leads, enquiries, calls etc) points. This got me thinking about the hidden costs of not measuring your marketing.
There are so many challenging reasons behind ‘why’ as a small business owner you might not be measuring your marketing. Better understanding these challenges, helps you to identify these road blocks and helps you in starting to address them. First, I want to talk a little about marketing measurement and the value of measuring your marketing.
Th Value of measuring your marketing.
In a nutshell. Marketing analytics and measurement empowers us to make informed decisions, improve our marketing spend, target the right audience groups, understand the right marketing channel mix, and at the end of the day, enhance your marketing and continue to grow your business. Often, my clients come to me feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the huge volume of data available to them and in not knowing where to start and what to look at. They’re often confused in understanding what’s actually working, and not working in their marketing. They’re frustrated from simply not having enough time in a day to introduce yet another task they need to take on as small business owner. It’s a lot, and these are challenges I see everyday. So if your feeling like this, again, please know, you’re not alone.
At this stage, you’re more often than not, relying on guesswork and gut feel to support your marketing. This means your understanding of how a particular Instagram or Facebook ad is working (or not working) to generate more bookings is limited and anecdotal, and therefore unreliable. It’s much more effective to have a strategic approach to measure your marketing. Its this type of approach that underpins the work I do everyday with small business owners to empower them to shift their mindset in how they approach marketing performance. Shifting their mindset and approach from one that is led by guesswork and gut feel, to an approach informed by data, and knowing.
Let’s look at a scenario for a minute.
Meet Sarah.
Sarah’s a small business owner who runs a hair salon that’s recently experienced low booking volumes. Her booking capacity is currently sitting at around 60% per month. Her ideal booking capacity is an average monthly rate of 85%. She started running Meta Ads to try and generate more bookings, but isn’t sure if they’re actually bringing in new client appointments, or how they’re actually performing against her objective.
With business being a little slow, Sarah has started running Meta ads and posting more on her Instagram account to try and bring in new clients. She’s spending around $250, and about 3 hours a week on the Instagram Ads, plus at least 1 to 2 hours every day on creating and posting organic content (posts, stories and reels) on Instagram. So there’s a fair amount of time going into this, on top of spend and effort.
All the content she’s been posting and putting out to the world is beautiful. It’s aesthetically pleasing and on brand, so, surely, it’ll result in new appointment bookings from new clients, right?
Turns out, Sarah’s Ads are driving huge volumes of visitors to her website, filling the awareness stage of her buyer’s journey (amazing!), her organic content across her Instagram and website is nurturing her audience through the consideration stage providing them with that initial education on what she offers (great!). But she has no marketing channels in place to support the decision stage of her buyer’s journey. No retargeting campaigns set up to nurture these potential customers back to her website to book, and no customer segments set up to identify who her highest converting audience is. This means Sarah has a considerable drop off point at this stage of her buyer’s journey. Understanding this would enable Sarah to implement a retargeting campaign, targeted her campaign material, content and messaging to this audience group based on defined rules set up in Google Analytics.
If you’re reading this thinking, OMG! This is me *insert hands over eyes emoji*. I want you to take a breath. Understanding what’s possible through your marketing data is the first step. You now have a very high level understanding, based on the scenario above, of what’s possible. Tick. This is where your start, and you continue to build your knowledge. It’s the old loose thread analogy. Now you’re pulling the thread.
The goal here is to help you shift your approach to marketing, from gut feel, guesswork and intuition to a state of ‘knowing‘. Knowing what you need to measure, based on your measurable defined SMART objectives, and then measuring your marketing efforts to implement informed tests and experiments, to learn and enhance your marketing performance.
Important note.
It’s important to highlight, that just because you measure your marketing, doesn’t mean your marketing will improve. How you interpret your data, the actions you take with the insights you have, and how you apply that to your marketing efforts is what differentiates you, and your ability to enhance your marketing efforts through data informed decisions. Your approaches to analysis and optimisation are vital in this.
Now, Let’s talk about those hidden costs.
So, now that we’ve established why marketing measurement is important. Let’s talk about the hidden costs and the impact when we don’t measure our marketing.
The best way I can describe marketing without measurement, is throwing a dart blindfolded and trying to hit the bullseye. Sure, you might hit the bullseye, but the probability is very low. At the end of the day, without data informing our decisions, we’re just hoping for the best. You might be spending money running ads, but if you’re not tracking and measuring how effective they actually are, you have no idea if they’re achieving your desired objective. When I talk about effectiveness, I’m talking about understanding if your ads are…
- reaching your target audience (your ideal customers),
- resonating with your audience (messaging and content), and
- most importantly, driving your desired result (sales, appointment bookings, calls etc).
When we don’t measure our marketing efforts, this results in:
- Wasted ads spend: Ask yourself, are you targeting people that fit within the right demographics and interest groups? Your data allows you to identify if you’re attracting the wrong audience, which in turn, is leading to wasted ad dollars on people who are not you potential clients/customers.
- Missed Opportunities: Imagine there’s a whole group of potential clients you haven’t even considered! Effective measurement can help you identify opportunity audience groups and tailor your approach to marketing and targeting accordingly. Imagine you assume Instagram was driving all of your appointment bookings, when in fact it was Organic Google Search. What if you’ve been investing time and money into Instagram all this time when you should have been also placing focus into building out your SEO to to optimise on this and attract new clients.
- Limited growth: Without knowing what’s working and what’s not in your marketing efforts, it’s hard to refine and improve your marketing strategy and optimise your campaigns for maximum impact, and financial return.
Stepping away from the vanity metrics.
Likes and comments are great, but they don’t necessarily translate to paying clients. While having a large social media following might seem impressive, its engagement and conversion is what truly matters. Ask yourself, “are people responding to my posts?” “Are they clicking through to my website and booking appointments (or making a purchase)?” If you’re not focusing on these metrics and areas, nows the time to start.
So, what can you do to get started with measuring your marketing?
- Define your business goals and marketing objectives. Define exactly what you want to achieve through your marketing efforts.
- Then, map the metrics and dimension you need to measure. This tells you exactly what metrics you need to look at, and what dimensions you need to layer into your reports to analyse and make informed decisions.
- Identify the analytics tools you’ll access to analyse this data and insights.
- From here you’ll either access the data directly in your chosen analytics tool, or you’ll create a tailored report that brings all of your need-to-see metrics in one place. This is my recommended approach – look at a free tool like Google’s Looker Studio.
- From here, its all about analysis and optimisations. When it comes to analysis and optimisation, I take a test, learn and optimise approach. Analytics is all about assumptions and experimentation to identify what is going to work for your unique business and marketing needs. There’s no cookie cutter approach.
Without marketing measurement, you’re marketing is ineffective. You’ll experience the hidden costs associated with not understanding what’s working and not working, wasted spend, miss opportunities, and limited growth across your marketing efforts and business. The ripple effect from this often result in lost sales, frustrated customers, and your or your team stuck in reactive mode, all while you lose money on activities with no clear ROI.
If you’re interested in learning more. Book one of my discovery calls and let’s work out how you can get started on your marketing analytics journey.
