As 2022 is now closed out, it can be helpful to take a little time to review and evaluate the successes and pitfalls of your marketing strategies throughout the year. A good marketing campaign can help you attract new customers, generate quality leads, learn more about your target demographic, and boost profits. Using marketing metrics, reviewing sales numbers, and gauging customer responses and reactions can help you develop an even savvier marketing strategy in 2023. Here are a few simple, quick ways you and your team can assess the success of your 2022 marketing strategy so that you can determine how to improve.
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Any business expense—but especially ones that pertain to marketing—should offer a good return on investment. Otherwise, you’re just throwing good money after bad. Therefore, you’ll want to find out if the money that you have invested into your 2022 marketing strategy resulted in a profit, or a loss. You can measure the time spent on each marketing campaign and compare it to the sales, leads, and conversions the campaign generated. Not all campaigns have a monetary gain but should at least further your business goals in other ways. A specific breakdown of each separate marketing campaign will give you data about which campaigns were successful, and which fell short.
The quickest, most accurate way to determine if a marketing plan is working is to compare your sales numbers for that year to the previous year, or the last year in which you didn’t use a similar marketing strategy or campaign. You should also consider rising costs, new employee hires or salary increases, and costs associated with expanding your business.
The reactions of your customers to each marketing campaign you put out in 2022 can also give you valuable insight as to the campaigns’ effectiveness. You can conduct online surveys, in-person surveys, and review general customer service feedback and online commentary to get a sense of how customers are reacting to your marketing, and which campaigns elicited the strongest responses. You can also direct customer service representatives to ask incoming callers how they found out about your latest sale.
If your market reach is expanding, it is likely due to your marketing strategy. Marketing will make its way into new regions either organically through customer recommendations or word of mouth, or due to aggressive marketing strategies that target a wider demographic.
Information about how your competitors have been advertising can be a great motivator and learning tool for your own marketing team. If you notice that competitors are rushing to copy your campaigns, you know that you’re onto something successful. But if your campaigns go unnoticed or ignored, or there is a negative response, you should rethink your marketing strategy.
The cost per win measures the total cost of each sale versus the cost of marketing. Comparing the two will give you data on which performs better. The cost per lead measures how effective the marketing campaigns were from a financial perspective as well but focuses on the number of leads generated rather than sales or wins. The cost per conversion matters for companies working with online sales, and measures how much it costs to convert a visitor into a customer.
Your marketing strategy should include advertising on your own website. You can use metrics on your website traffic throughout each campaign to determine how successful your website is, and to compare numbers to other time frames when different campaigns were in effect.
This metric will give you data on how relevant your website is overall. If the number of returning visitors is high, you can interpret that as customers returning because your site is valuable. This metric should be evaluated throughout each campaign and as you add content to your website. You can also look at how many total visits your website gets, even if they are from the same visitor. Finally, look at the site visit duration. The length of time a visitor spends browsing can give you valuable information, especially if they don’t end up making a purchase. A high number of visitors who browse for a long time without purchasing may indicate your site is hard to use or that customers can’t find what they’re looking for.
If you read this entire article and still don’t know whether your 2022 marketing strategy was a success or a failure, contact us at Group 6 Interactive. We’re a team of experienced, friendly web design, SEO, and digital marketing experts who specialize in giving Vermont businesses the chance to thrive in the online marketplace. We offer more than just web design—our talented team also focuses on offering business scalable, customizable services that will work with any small business’ budget. We can assist you with SEO, logo and brand identity, online marketing, reputation management, graphic design, and more. To learn more or to schedule an initial consultation, call us today at (802) 342-4656 or contact us online.
