Importance of Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Channels

If you've ever watched Hell's Kitchen with Chef Gordon Ramsay, you know how important it is to measure your ingredients and in this case the effectiveness of your marketing channels.

Don't be backed into a corner with Chef Ramsay yelling, what do you mean you didn't know what to measure?

We all know that your answer will never cut it.

You should know if your marketing campaign is effective or not.

Actively track and measure various metrics that showcase the effectiveness of your efforts.

You don't want it to be the last day of the month and you realize that you're no where near hitting your goals for the month.

How to Measure Your Marketing Channels

Companies implementing inbound marketing, employ a variety of marketing channels such as blogging, email marketing, social media, and search engine optimization.

To continually improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, you need to know what channels work and which ones aren't performing.

The Definition of a Marketing Channel

When we talk about “channel effectiveness”, what we’re really talking about are the different lead sources that are bringing visitors and leads to your site.

A lead source includes email marketing, social media, organic search, direct and referrals.

When you look at each channel separately, you’re able to them properly gauge just how effective that channel is and whether or not it’s a worthwhile in terms of ROI.

So what should you be measuring?  Without further adieu, let’s begin with:

Monthly Goals

 If you want to keep close tabs on your marketing channels, then this is the metric to keep a watchful eye on.

Keeping an eye on your leads and traffic water fall graphs are essential to ensuring that you're on track to meeting your goals for the month. Don't keep the same goal month after month. How are you going to know if you're efforts are actually working? Most likely you won't. Each month increase the number of visits and leads you want to achieve.

It's important to note that sending one email and posting 4 blog articles a month isn't going to help you attain those goals. Depending on how aggressive your goals are, you might need to adjust how much content you're creating and how often you're engaging with your audience on social media.

Don't just stop at how much traffic and leads your obtaining for the month. To get a better look at your marketing channel, identify which sources are bringing those individuals to your site.

So ... what channel is generating the most traffic for your company? Are you seeing that more people are coming to your site organically or through social media? The reasons behind that could be that you are ranking well for key search terms your target audience is searching or your social media profiles have a lot of engagement and reach.

Goals are essential to increasing your email marketing or scaling your amount of engagement on Facebook and Twitter to increase lead generation. You should also dive deeper into each campaign to identify what's working and what you might need to change.

Inbound marketing isn't something that you set and forget. You need to actively monitor you campaign, in the event that you need to make adjustments to meet your goals.

Percentage of Paid and Organic Leads

This is an important one, since it will really help you determine which one is costing you more in terms of money, and which one’s costing you more when it comes to your time (which may be invaluable at this point).

Paid, for example, is any marketing channel that you’ve actually invested in or spent money on, like a PPC campaign or social media advertising.  Organic, on the other hand, are any methods that you’ve implemented that cost you nothing but time, like engaging and interacting in social media or regularly producing content for your blog.

It’s important that businesses and marketers keep a close eye on which channels are driving the greatest number of visitors and converting leads.  This will help you budget your money, while also helping you then improve either effort to help you achieve your overall business goals.

For example, many businesses have the goal of reducing their dependency on any sort of paid advertising.  Great.  Then you can use this measurement to help determine how many leads are coming through paid advertising, how many are finding you organically, and you can then begin to build a marketing strategy to help support organic leads over paid leads.

Close Rate Per Channel

The goal of any business is customer acquisition, hopefully you're already keeping an eye on this every important stat.

You should know – or endeavor to know – exactly what channel is driving those leads to convert, and which channels are getting the most sales and generating the most customers.

A big mistake a lot of businesses make is they assume that the channel that drives the most visitors is the one that’s driving the most conversions.  That's not always true.  As a matter of fact, a lot of channels that drive visitors may not actually be giving you a lot of conversions in comparison to, say, social media.

The close rate that you can obtain from each and every marketing channel will tell you exactly what quality of leads are coming through from each channel and how you can further optimize high performing channels and re-vamp those channels that have poor performance -- or you might ditch them all together.