One of the key components of a successful marketing campaign, is metrics. This is something that most small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t think about when they go to market their business. There are literally hundreds of tools and companies out there, that help business owners track how effective your marketing and business operations are. I put together a few of my favorite tools in this blog post, that I encourage all of my consulting clients and members of my high-level mastermind groups to use. These tools are a good place to start if you’re interested in knowing how effective your marketing efforts are. Enjoy!
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service that allows you to measure website traffic and website traffic flow. Website traffic is the amount of people visiting your site and website traffic flow takes into consideration the various ways people are navigating your site. (ie: which pages they go to and in what order)
Another cool feature of Google Analytics is the tool’s ability to show you which countries and states people are visiting your site from.
If you plan to use Google AdWords, Google Analytics also provides analytics reports for your AdWords campaigns.
The most important Google Analytics feature that many small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t use, is the Conversions Tool. Within Google Analytics you have the ability to set up metrics on your websites to measure conversions. If you don’t know what a conversion is, it’s simply a term that means a prospect converted to a customer. If you set it up properly, Google Analytics will track conversion rates for virtually anything on your site.
It does a bunch of other really cool stuff too… all for FREE!
Click to find out more about Google Analytics.
2. Facebook Page Insights
Facebook Page Insights give you data on the levels of engagement and interactions with the content you post on your business Facebook Page. This tool also allows you to see the actual demographics of your Facebook community. Demographic information like age, gender, country, and city is provided to you as the Page Administrator in an easy to understand dashboard.
Insights allow you to see the reach, engagement, and interactions for each individual post that you publish to your business page timeline. This is a great feature if you are looking to grow your page through Facebook’s recently new Promoted Posts function, or if you are looking to test the effectiveness of different types of content.
Click to find out more about Facebook Insights.
3. Infusionsoft
Passionate about helping small businesses succeed, Infusionsoft is an all-in-one small business sales & marketing automation software that helps busy entrepreneurs and small business owners leverage their time and increase sales. Infusionsoft gives you the ability to generate leads for your business and nurture the leads until they become customers or clients.
One of the main features of the software is their sophisticated email marketing technology. It allows you to track if people click on links within your e-mail. This function allows you to create custom follow-up campaigns, gauge the interest of your leads, and deliver custom content to a specific segment of your database.
Since Infusionsoft also has a shopping cart function, it makes it really easy to track the success of specific e-mail marketing campaigns.
I have several friends that work for Infusionsoft and they’ve told me that over the next months and years, you will see an improvement in their software’s ability to relay sophisticated metrics to their users.
Last month Infusionsoft acquired company called GrowSocial, so you can expect to see more development around Infusionsoft’s capabilities in social media marketing as well.
Discover how to automate your sales & marketing efforts with a Free Infusionsoft demo.
4. Bit.ly Links
Bit.ly (bitt-lee) is a free online service that allows you to track the number of times any given link is clicked on. It also gives you a shortened link so that your 100-character long link is nice, short, and pretty. It even allows you to create custom short URLs which I highly suggest you take advantage of.
This tool is extremely easy to use and it’s a great way to track traffic to landing pages or blog posts from social media, guest blog posts, etc. (I don’t recommend using bit.ly links in e-mails as it will increase the likelihood of ending up in the spam folder.)
Click to find out more about Bit.ly trackable links.
5. Trackable 1-800 Numbers – Dial800.com
Trackable 800 numbers are something that very few small businesses leverage in their marketing but it’s something that can provide very valuable information.
For an example, let’s say that you’re a dentist. You want to promote your teeth whitening services by giving away a complimentary teeth whitening. To let people know, you put up a big sign out front of your office, you send out a direct mail flyer to your current client base, and you even train your front desk assistant to give every person a flyer on their way out.
Most of the time, clients will call you to set appointments in advance so how do you know how much business was generated from that campaign with out tracking the calls? More importantly, how do you know which of your efforts was most effective? How do you know that the money you spent designing the flyer and mailing your existing customer base produced a return on investment for you?
Yes, you could ask every single person that calls how they found out, but that’s not professional. What’s professional and virtually 100% error free is having 3 different 800 numbers that track all the data for you. A smart, marketing-savvy business owner would have three different 800 numbers and would place one on the banner out front, one on the direct mail flyer, and the last one on the flyer being handed to customers leaving the office.
Click to find out more about Trackable 1-800 Numbers with Dial800.com.
Wrapping it up
Metrics (measuring your actions) are one of the most important aspects of your business. Many small business owners and entrepreneurs have little or no systems in place to measure the effectiveness of their efforts. In order to create efforts that generate the results you want, you first have to have a rock-solid strategy.
To get more information about creating a rock-solid strategy, check out this overview of a framework I created to help small business owners and experts create strategic marketing plans.
Click here: Introduction to the Strategic Marketing Compass
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