When Marketing Progress is Measured, Performance Improves

Importance of Marketing Performance Reporting

With a variety of digital channels, small businesses are in the unique situation where they can significantly boost revenues without heavy expenditures. And one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that companies can tie each expense to a measurable result.

In traditional marketing and advertising– like the days of Don Draper and Mad Men– the success of a marketing campaign was difficult to track. Any boost to sales could be the result of a number of factors that were unrelated to the marketing expense.

But with performance reporting small businesses can measure their digital marketing ROI. This type of analysis is the difference between throwing money at a marketing issue and crossing your fingers for luck.

Performance reporting can change your business. Here’s how:

1. Performance Reporting Saves Money

If you want to get your money’s worth with digital marketing then it is necessary to have the right tools in place to see what works and what doesn’t. And in the digital age, it is too late to wait and see down the road.

Businesses know that digital marketing can transform their companies. In fact, 80% of companies are set to increase their marketing budgets.

But an investing is worthless unless it delivers results. And some companies are so overwhelmed with the possibilities of new digital tools and markets they aren’t sure where to begin.

Worse still is the marketing consultants who promise big results without a link to measurable goals. Reporting on performance allows companies to track where their money is going.

Rather than wait for a campaign to soar or flop, reporting lets companies reinvest or abandon their efforts right away.

If the Facebook ads aren’t working you can drop them right away and redouble your investment in video content on YouTube that is seeing results.

You won’t waste your money. And every penny you spend can transform itself into market research too.

2. You Won’t Leave Your Performance to Chance

Being proactive is one of those buzzwords that exists for good reason. Especially in digital marketing–where every moment wasted can give your competition an edge — it’s important to plan ahead. Performance reporting allows your company to see what works and what doesn’t in real time.

Everyone in business should prefer preparing for the storm to trying to rebuild after the flood. With digital marketing reporting tools, you can make adjustments as you go.

Rather than waiting for quarterly revenue reports, or the impact of digital campaigns to SEO down the road, performance reporting helps your company remain proactive and strategic in digital marketing strategies.

3. Measuring With Your Business Goals in Mind

If there is any doubt about the dramatic impact small investments to digital marketing can make for your company you can take content creation as an example. One company was able to increase inbound traffic 3000% in a single year by focusing on creating 4 pieces of content per week on average.

This type of performance is easy to track. You simply focus on one aspect of your blog and then use Analytics to measure inbound traffic.

But performance reporting goes many steps beyond this information. For one, how valuable is the spike in traffic if it isn’t from your target clients? What if all that effort results in a tiny spike in conversions?

Of far more importance is using the right reporting mechanism to tie performance into your business objectives.

4. A Diversified Approach

What company can afford to deploy a single marketing approach and hope that it works? With basic SEO and traffic measures, your business is typically considering a single campaign at a time.

But digital marketing success means using a variety of digital channels to achieve a number of goals.

Are you trying to boost reviews to drive sales? Leverage social media to increase inbound traffic and conversions? Is your content campaign aimed at creating inbound links to raise awareness of your brand?

Whatever your integrated strategy is, it can’t depend on a single digital channel. There is too much opportunity to waste.

By tying your campaigns into overall business goals you can measure the strength of each and how they contribute to your bottom line. SEO or traffic alone–even just measuring revenue against marketing spend–can’t come close to this level of granularity.

5. Knowing Your Clients

An unfortunate byproduct of all the access to digital markets is that companies send out a message in a scattershot approach at times. Their strategy is based on hoping something might work much more than knowing what will work ahead of time.

And the difference between knowing and hoping is having an intimate understanding of your current and prospective clients. Performance reporting is not just a measure of marketing campaign success in real time.

One of the benefits of this level of analysis is that performance reporting equals free market research. And market research that is tailored to the exact needs of your company.

By linking current client data with digital behaviors you won’t just know what works in marketing strategies. You will actually learn more and more about your client base each day.

6. Going Beyond SEO and PPC

While SEO and PPC campaigns can deliver data on the habits of your internet visitors, a performance reporting approach can leverage what you already know to construct new campaigns.

If you know the current audience you are serving, and what they most respond to, you have a ripe target market to invest in.

Reporting on the condition of your marketing campaigns links their effectiveness to the needs and desires of your current and potential clients. This is a detailed form of data no business could have hoped for 20 years ago.

Getting the Best Results

Once you know the benefits of performance reporting all that is left is to construct a set of measurement data that is linked to your company goals. Unfortunately, knowing how to create and track these performance metrics is part art and science and depends on marketing experience.

Don’t leave your marketing campaigns to chance.

Bear Fox marketing can deliver results with your campaigns and show you how to measure each level of performance.