Tag: marketing metrics

8 ways to measure, monitor & enhance your marketing!

Posted on by Richard Milton

There are so many readily available systems and processes for you to use when measuring, monitoring and enhancing your marketing impact. Some examples include:

• Adding a web analytics tool e.g. Google Analytics to your website to track and monitor your website performance. Are you reaching the right audience and are they engaging with your site?

• Monitoring the performance of your keywords for your website to ensure your Search Engine performance is optimised. Do you appear high enough in google so that your customers will find you?

• Using an email based system e.g. Mailchimp that allows you to monitor your email open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes etc. Do your subscribers respond to your emails or one type of email campaign compared to another?

• Monitoring your social media demographics and engagement levels. Do your followers match your target audience? Which channel is more effective for brand building vs sales generation? What posts are more effective than other posts e.g. image driven vs video based?

• Conducting Net Promotor Score (NPS) research to understand your customers loyalty to your business. Are they willing to recommend your business to their family and friends?

• Adding UTM tracking codes to your digital advertising, social media activity or email campaigns. How do the different channels drive traffic to your website? Which channel is more effective? How does one advertising media e.g. Google paid ads compared to ads you run for example on Facebook?

• Using a CRM system to record and monitor customer engagement and sales. What approaches generate the most leads and which of these turn into paying customers?

• You can use the same CRM data to explore which customers are the most important to your business? What characteristics do this customers share and how can you find more businesses or individuals who share the same characteristics to help drive forward your business?

Measure4success blog

Measure4success is the blog for e-nexus Ltd.  We are a Bournemouth based Marketing consultancy specialising in Strategic Marketing Planning and Performance Measurement.  Learn more about what we do and how we can support your business by emailing info@e-nexus.co.uk or by visiting our website at www.e-nexus.co.uk

Marketing is so much more than promotion

Posted on by Richard Milton

No matter the size of your business every penny you spend & every hour you commit to your marketing has to count towards you achieving your business goals.

Promotion is an important part in your marketing efforts but ‘effective marketing’, the entire marketing that satisfies the needs of your customers is so much more. You can have a great promotional campaign but if your product or service isn’t wanted or you are charging prices that are above what your target customers will pay then it will struggle to deliver.

 

To have ‘effective marketing’ you need to consider a wider range of factors than just promotion. Much of it isn’t difficult with the result being that it can transform the impact of your marketing. Here are just a few ideas:

• Start with product. Give customers what they need not what you think they need. Think wider than the actual product – consider the other features that surround your product – delivery methods and times, guarantees, installations, refunds, exchange policies – all of which can make your product or service more attractive.

• Speak to your customers. Ask them what they need and want from you. Find out what they think of your product or service and how it can be improved.

• Ask your customers for reviews. If they are liking what you do then encourage them to share with others what they think of your product and to post reviews on-line.

• Regularly monitor your sector and competitors. Consider how tastes are changing or new products are being launched and adapt where necessary.

• Make it easy for people to acquire your product. That maybe how they can find you or buy your product on-line. Make sure your website is mobile responsive and is search engine optimised.

• Develop your team. Ensure that everyone who works for you has great knowledge about your business and offer. Ensure they also have the right attitude & provide the level of service your customers would expect.

• Be responsive to your customers. Ensure you follow up on enquiries quickly – not many buy products or services from a company they have had to chase or have had to wait a long time to respond.

• Deal with customer complaints well. No doubts you have all had customers who haven’t been completely satisfied but how you deal and resolve their compliant will make all the difference to whether they buy from you again or recommend you to others.

• Measure, measure, measure. If you don’t measure your marketing you can’t understand, control or improve it. Use tools such as Google Analytics to see how well your website is working, monitor your email performance or conduct market research to understand what your target audience think about you and your product or service.

About the author

Richard Milton is founder of e-nexus Ltd – a Marketing Consultancy based in Bournemouth specialising in Strategic Marketing Planning and Performance Measurement. He is a career long marketer holding numerous senior marketing positions throughout his 20+ years in the profession.

Describing himself as a marketing strategist, Richard spends his time working with business owners, managers and marketers to help them improve their marketing decisions, investments and impact by connecting data, insight and creativity alongside his strategic experience.

 

How are you measuring your marketing impact?

How much is marketing contributing to the success of your business? Do you know?

Posted on by Richard Milton

Given the availability of data and insight within all organisations, there has never been a better time to measure and regularly monitor the performance and impact of your marketing. Now is the time to identify what works, what could work better and what you should stop to ensure you get the most out of the marketing for your business.

So where to start?

In many cases simply planning ahead and identifying what you want to measure is a great starting point. Then thinking about how you could go about measuring and monitoring the the impact of the activity. Finally, consider what measurement actions and systems you need to put in place to gather the insight and data you need.

Need a place to start?

There are so many readily available systems and processes for you to use when measuring, monitoring and enhancing your marketing impact. Some examples include:

• Adding a web analytics tool e.g. Google Analytics to your website to track and monitor your website performance. Are you reaching the right audience and are they engaging with your site?

• Monitoring the performance of your keywords for your website to ensure your Search Engine performance is optimised. Do you appear high enough in google so that your customers will find you?

• Using an email based system e.g. Mailchimp that allows you to monitor your email open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes etc. Do your subscribers respond to your emails or one type of email campaign compared to another?

• Monitoring your social media demographics and engagement levels. Do your followers match your target audience? Which channel is more effective for brand building vs sales generation? What posts are more effective than other posts e.g. image driven vs video based?

• Conducting Net Promotor Score (NPS) research to understand your customers loyalty to your business. Are they willing to recommend your business to their family and friends?

• Adding UTM tracking codes to your digital advertising, social media activity or email campaigns. How do the different channels drive traffic to your website? Which channel is more effective? How does one advertising media e.g. Google paid ads compared to ads you run for example on Facebook?

• Using a CRM system to record and monitor customer engagement and sales. What approaches generate the most leads and which of these turn into paying customers?

• You can use the same CRM data to explore which customers are the most important to your business? What characteristics do this customers share and how can you find more businesses or individuals who share the same characteristics to help drive forward your business?

At e-nexus we specialise in Strategic Marketing Planning & Performance Measurement. Need some help to work out how best to monitor and measure your marketing then email info@e-nexus.co.uk or visit our website at www.e-nexus.co.uk

About the author

Richard Milton is founder of e-nexus Ltd – a Marketing Consultancy based in Bournemouth specialising in Strategic Marketing Planning and Performance Measurement. He is a career long marketer holding numerous senior marketing positions throughout his 20+ years in the profession.

Describing himself as a marketing strategist, Richard spends his time working with business owners, managers and marketers to help them improve their marketing decisions, investments and impact by connecting data, insight and creativity alongside his strategic experience.

How important are existing customers to your business

How important are existing customers to your business? Do you know?

Posted on by Richard Milton

How important are existing customers to your business? Do you know?

Who doesn’t want a good base of individuals or businesses who are loyal, regular, repeat customers. We all do surely, it makes sound business sense.

But do you know how important existing customers are to you business? Are you confident that you are placing enough emphasis on retaining existing customers compared to attracting new customers? Perhaps now is the time to find out by calculating your Returning vs New Customer Metrics.

These metrics will help you understand the real value of these two groups to your business and enable you, as with any good metric, to make decisions on how much time and money you should put into your marketing for the different groups.

• Start by calculating your Total Number of Customers either at a specific point of time e.g. 1st January or over a point of time e.g. in 2018. Now split these into new customers and repeat customers to see your new customer to repeat customer ratio.

• Next work out the Value of an Average New Customer to your business vs that of a Returning Customer over the lifetime of your relationship. We generally recommend it’s worth also considering the costs you incur with attracting new customers e.g. advertising and retaining existing customers e.g. loyalty incentives. You can now see the costs of generating business and how the business generated between the two groups varies over time. Does that value change over the period a customer stays with you?

• Finally look at calculating the Average Time a Customer Remains Loyal to your business. This is a good indicator of your customers views towards your organisation, how good you are at maintaining existing customer relationships and their likely purchase intentions.

What next?

With this understanding conduct a review of what you do to attract new customers and keep existing customers. Think about the time, money and effort you put into these two groups. Have you got the balance right? Should you for example amend your advertising spend or customer relationship management approaches? Should you consider incentives to either attract new customers or keep existing customers? Perhaps if you discover customers aren’t particularly loyal you should consider loyalty schemes or enhancing the quality of your customer service.

Whatever you do with this knowledge you’ll be in a much stronger position as a business to maximise the benefits from both groups and drive your business forward.

About the author

Richard Milton is founder of e-nexus Ltd – a Marketing Consultancy based in Bournemouth specialising in Strategic Marketing Planning and Performance Measurement. He is a career long marketer, holding numerous senior marketing positions throughout his 20 years in the profession. Describing himself as a marketing strategist, performance and measurement specialist, Richard spends time working with business owners, managers and marketers to help them improve their marketing decisions, investments and impact by harnessing the power of data and insights alongside his strategic experience.

Richard’s biggest passion is to help marketers show the value of their efforts and give them the confidence and skills to be able to share the story with their senior managers. Richard helps organisations understand the importance of measurement and metrics as well as appreciate the breadth of data available to them in todays marketing world.

You can read more from Richard at his measure4success blog at www.measure4success.wordpress.com.  To find out more about e-nexus visit www.e-nexus.co.uk