This year, is improving your marketing accountability and growing your business at the top of your goal list? If your eCommerce business has been struggling to make the most of your marketing dollars, then try this on for size this year: make your marketing efforts more accountable!
You don’t need more arbitrary marketing that you simply hope will bring in the customers your business needs. Instead, find ways to make your marketing count and discover how well it’s working for you. Data from Forbes suggests that using data-driven marketing strategies can help increase your marketing success by 5% or more.
Five Ways to Make Your Marketing Efforts More Accountable
1. Create Specific, Attainable Goals
It’s easy to fall into the trap of setting intangible goals. You want to increase your marketing success, bring in more sales, and add more people to your mailing list. Creating marketing accountability, however, means taking it beyond vague goals and creating specific numbers that you consider to be a measure of success. For example, would you like to raise sales by 10% over the next quarter? Increase mailing list signups by 25%?
Setting goals that you can measure won’t just give you a way to evaluate success. It will also provide your marketing team with a benchmark to help them see how well they’re performing.
2. Watch the Right Metrics
Many merchants and business owners fall into the trap of watching vanity metrics. Vanity metrics look great on paper but don’t really contribute to the success of your business. For example, a thriving blog may draw in plenty of visitors on a daily basis, but if they aren’t making purchases or turning to your business with their purchases, these aren’t effective visits.
Another example. Social media likes and follows are great, but are they genuinely contributing to your business’s overall success and ROI? Make sure that you’re watching the right metrics. How many customers are you moving through the sales funnel? How are your sales working? Are you constantly struggling to bring in new customers, or is it easy for your business to attract repeat customers? Define the metrics that are right for you to watch your marketing efforts thrive.
3. Use the Right Tools
Talk with your marketing department to make sure that they have the right tools on hand to meet their marketing goals. Do they have a scalable website site that can support a massive traffic spike during sales and promotions? Is there solid analytics software in place to help measure traffic, check your site’s pages, and evaluate the search terms that are bringing visitors to your site?
With the right tools, your marketing team is able to accomplish more while reporting a better picture of what they’re accomplishing.
4. Know How to Target Specific Customers
Do you know how your customers’ past purchases relate to their current and future needs? How can bring them back for another purchase? How can customer interaction teach your team more? Make sure your marketing team is taking advantage of that opportunity to learn more about customers’ needs and create targeted marketing for future efforts. Making a consistent effort to analyze your customers is a great way to increase customer lifetime value with a comparatively minimal expense.
5. Keep Measuring
Once you’ve set your goals and taken the steps necessary to attain them, make sure you’re keeping track of the marketing team’s successes! By evaluating those goals and checking in on their progress on a regular basis, you’ll find that you’re better positioned to maintain accountability and make the most of your marketing dollars. With an accountable marketing strategy, merchants have the agility to make changes quickly when numbers start to drop during slow seasons. The right data and numbers are invaluable to an agile marketing team.
This year, marketing accountability should be your primary focus for your business. If you need help with marketing accountability, contact us today to discover how we can help make that critical difference for your eCommerce business.