By Erin Daniels, The KNOW Women
Effective and results-driven marketing is necessary to successfully grow your business and expand your clientele. In order to market your business in a way that gets you the results you desire, you have to make sure you are asking the right questions! What is your brand mission and story? How does your company measure success? Who is your target audience? These questions along with many others will allow you to create a marketing strategy that caters to your ideal customers and business goals while telling your business story.
In addition to the foundation of your marketing strategy, there are many other aspects that come into play such as having a budget for your marketing dollars and measuring the success of your strategy. Creating and implementing an effective marketing strategy can be difficult, but fear not! There are plenty of knowledgeable marketing companies that can help lead you to success.
We asked our high-achieving KNOW women all about their marketing strategies, how to measure success, and what to look for in a marketing professional. Follow along on our four-part mini-series to get the answers you need in order to implement a successful marketing strategy for your business!
What KPIs/ OKRs do you use to measure the impact of your marketing spend?
We measure our website traffic, conversion to qualified leads, and customer conversion to measure the impact of our marketing spend. We want to generate the right traffic to improve our sales qualified leads, and then optimize our marketing outreach to prospects to decrease the sales cycle and increase revenue.
–Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
Our biggest indicators are our referral sources we do build up from our networking. I see our business as the necessity that everyone doesn’t realize they need. Once they realize it, they go to their referral sources which end up being clients or referral sources/friends of ours and they recommend us greatly.
–Christina Ingrid Maksoud, MakSchu Productions
We measure data from our website analytics. This helps us to assess views, time spent on pages, new prospects scheduling, and conversion ratios from initial consultations to new client onboarding.
–Alison Stine, Stine Wealth Management
For digital ads, CTR (click thru rate) and CPA (cost per acquisition)are the main things to monitor. A high CTR can seem like an ideal goal, but you must look at how well those clicks convert. Better a lower CTR, but a higher conversion rate. That means you’re really getting to the heart of your consumer. A cool trick is to see how well people respond to your company newsletter. The topics with a high email open rate can also inform what ads you may want to create because your current audience is sharing what is important to them.
–Trish Saemann, GoBeyond SEO
We track new client inquiries, where they came from, if they fit our ideal client. Ultimately the measure of success is the number of new client relationships and net new assets.
–Laura A Webb, Webb Investment Services | Her Two Cents Podcast
A lot of KPIs are just there to make us feel like we’re accomplishing something. But at the scale of my one-person business, I care a lot less about KPIs that don’t pay my bills. I look at email subscribers, email open rates, and conversion rates.
–Kathleen Celmins, KathleenCelmins.com
I never measure spend because viewing marketing dollars as an expense is setting the metric up for failure. Also, to get the most accurate data, I use both metrics – KPIs to red flag performance issues and OKRs to find the root cause and fix it. That being said, the metrics I measure are specific to the mission of each company. In company A, I focus heavily on membership churn while in company B it’s conversion rates, and in every company, I measure customer experience.
–Linette Montae, Profitable Empires
Some of the KPI’s we use are Cost per lead, Customer Acquisition Costs, Number of leads acquired, and increase in brand awareness.
–Nadia Kaminskaya, Branding Bosses
Always focus on ROI. The challenge is measuring ROI, some initiatives are easier than others to understand the true return. If you are not sure how to measure, consult an expert.
–Erin Wilder, 81 & Sunny
