With effective marketing programs, success isn't just about creating buzz; it's about tangible results that directly impact your bottom line. To ensure an accountable return on investment, deciphering whether your marketing efforts are truly effective is paramount.
In a world awash with data, it can be difficult to know what matters most. So we’re breaking down best practices for tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Tailoring Metrics to the Buyer's Journey
Understanding the nuances of the buyer's journey for your business is crucial when it comes to measuring marketing effectiveness. Especially in a highly considered purchase decision, like hiring a financial advisor, because the process of building trust and a relationship through marketing can take several months, even years.
Different metrics are used to determine the success of your marketing efforts based on the stage in the journey they’re reaching your audience. So, let’s break down what to measure throughout your potential client’s path toward working with you.
Awareness and Interest: In these early stages, your marketing programs focus on attracting your potential client's attention and engaging them with your brand. Common marketing channels used at this stage include social media, public relations, content marketing, search marketing, and paid advertising.
Key metrics to track include:
- Impressions: Gauge the reach of your message and identify areas for potential growth.
- Follower/Audience Growth: Monitor new followers and total followers, indicating growing brand interest and that you’re not losing the interest of followers with a shrinking audience base.
- Engagement: Assess the resonance of your content through reactions, comments, and shares.
- Website Metrics: Track visits, top pages, and traffic sources to evaluate how well you're converting your audience to a high-value brand experience on your site.
- Leads Generated: The ultimate measure of success in these stages is to generate new leads for your firm.
Consideration and Purchase: Once someone has provided their contact information and is now a lead in your system, your marketing efforts will focus on moving them closer to ultimately becoming a client by providing relevant content that addresses their concerns. In the consideration and purchase stages of the wealth management client journey, email marketing, content marketing, webinars and events, remarketing and retargeting are common marketing programs.
Metrics to measure in these stages are:
- Engagement Rates: Measure interaction levels with channels like emails, webinars, and events.
- Conversion Rates: Evaluate the transition of engaged leads to opportunities or appointments.
- Close Rates: Assess the effectiveness of converting the prospect meetings into clients.
Aggregate Your Marketing Results
Beyond looking at the success of marketing tactics by stage in the buyer’s journey, it’s critical to evaluate total marketing effectiveness. Track the following metrics in your business to ensure they’re improving over time:
- Cost per New Lead, Appointment, and Client: Calculate the efficiency of your marketing spend at each conversion stage.
- New Assets Gathered vs. Marketing Spend: Evaluate the return on investment in terms of assets added by new clients, compared to your marketing spend.
Looking at these aggregate figures will help you spot issues more easily. For example, if you have a really low cost per lead and but your cost per appointment is high, that will indicate underlying lead quality issues. Drill into which programs are driving the lower-quality leads and take corrective action.
And in this article, we haven't touched on all the marketing activities reaching your clients - but the same philosophy applies. Measure the metrics that align with the stage of the client journey, and zoom out regularly to ensure the entire ecosystem is working for you.
Establishing a Reporting Schedule
Regular reporting is fundamental to maintaining accountability and driving results-oriented strategies:
- Weekly Updates: Your marketing team should be tracking their results weekly to facilitate agile decision-making.
- Monthly In-depth Reviews: Dive deeper into the data to identify trends, successes, and areas for improvement.
- Quarterly Leadership Presentations: Provide comprehensive insights to firm leadership, demonstrating the impact of marketing efforts on business objectives.
Gain Confidence in Your Marketing Results
Measuring marketing effectiveness requires a multifaceted approach that considers the nuances of the buyer's journey and the alignment of metrics with business goals. By tracking key indicators and adhering to a structured reporting schedule, marketers can gain invaluable insights into the performance of their strategies and drive meaningful results for their organizations. So, embark on this journey armed with the right metrics and reporting practices, and unlock the true potential of your marketing programs.
