How do you know if your marketing is working?
Your marketing is working when you can show more inquiries, and more customers, coming from the channels you are paying for, at a cost per customer the business can live with. That means recording where every inquiry came from and what happened to it. Visits, followers and rankings can point the right way, but on their own they do not show that marketing is working.
Five numbers to track every month
- Inquiries, by the channel they came from: search, AI answer, social, referral, paid, email, campaign or direct.
- Customers won, by the same channels.
- What each channel cost you, in money and in time.
- Cost per new customer for each channel: what it cost, divided by the customers it brought in.
- Time to first reply, because research links a faster reply to more inquiries becoming real conversations.
How to read them
Compare each month with the one before and with the same month last year, if you have it. Give a channel long enough to work before you judge it: search builds over months, while an ad usually shows its effect sooner. Look for the channel that brings customers at a cost you can repeat, then put more into it.
Warning signs in a marketing report
- It shows traffic, impressions or rankings but never inquiries or customers.
- It credits every customer to the marketing, including people who would have found you anyway.
- The numbers cannot be traced back to real inquiries you can look up.
- It changes what it measures from month to month.
Related answers
- What is lead attribution, and why does a small business need it?
- How fast should a business reply to a new lead?
- How long does SEO take to work?
Lead systems and lead tracking
A lead that waits a day goes cold, and a lead with no source teaches you nothing. Ascent Vision fixes both.