Small business doesn’t mean small marketing – In fact, it typically means big marketing goals with less time and minimal resources. Make the most of your local marketing efforts while keeping your goals big by streamlining your measurement metrics into the 4 must haves.
We’ve talked before about the importance of speaking directly to your audience and avoiding the mistake of ‘casting too wide a net’ when it comes to local marketing. Being specific creates relevancy, and relevancy is key to driving conversions with your marketing.
Breaking your marketing into a marketing funnel is an ideal way to divide audience segment by their place in the user journey. Understanding if your marketing tactic’s goal is to gain exposure, find new customers, keep current customers engaged, or transition current customers to new products/services is going to dictate the tactic you use.
Following these 4 most meaningful marketing metrics you can measure success in each of your marketing tactics using the same formula -how easy is that?
1. Your Time
In small business management, time is money. Don’t forget to consider the amount of time that you are having to put into each of your marketing tactics. While doing things ‘in house’ may seem like the best use of funds, it’s often a time suck, taking you away from important operational tasks.
Consider if there are outside resources you could be taking advantage of. Finding third party services built for local marketing is generally a game changer for small businesses. These companies are built specifically for local marketing efforts and don’t provide too much, which often brings high price tags.
2. Response Rate
Are customers responding to your marketing? With digital injections in almost every marketing tactic it is becoming easier to measure the effectiveness of your marketing’s impact. Think of this metric as simply as possible – how many people did I put my marketing in front of? and how many of them did what I asked of them?
This metric can tell you the effectiveness of your audience targeting, offer value, and graphic look & feel. Insist that all marketing tactics provide response rate data, it’s the only way to know if you’re making the right first impression.
3. Customer Lifetime Value
Marketing has a long-term value. Only measuring the short-term value is going to skew your perspective of marketing success and destroy your long-term customer loyalty flow. When measuring your marketing it’s imperative that you consider both the short and long-term value of the responders.
Take your above response rate and track the return rate of those customers. Consider your response rate the short-term success and the return rate the long-term success. Generally, your business is going to make exponentially more money off a handful of customers with a high return rate versus a high response rate with no sense of loyalty.
4. Next Steps
How well does your marketing funnel transition customers from one tactic to the next? Thinking wholistically about your local marketing is going to save you time and transition your customers quicker through the funnel. Anticipate what information you will need from your customers before they reach the next step in the funnel and you can automate many pieces of your marketing.
For instance, if you are using a targeted & trackable direct mailer as top of the funnel marketing and your next step is email marketing, then insist that your responders provide an email address at the time of redemption.
Here at Welcomemat, we specialize in building local marketing plans fit for each part of the marketing funnel. If you’re looking for ways to bring in new customers or keep current customers engaged CONTACT US for more information.
