Measuring Marketing Channels to Scale Your Business

This post follows the theme of addressing common challenges affecting early stage business growth and scalability. As indicated in prior posts, words like business and risk are near synonyms for one another. We hope that by continuing to share these challenges and solutions to commonly found early stage and start-up business problems we are helping our community of readers unlock their potential by avoiding friction to known set-backs.

In this post we will discuss the importance of marketing channel performance measurement, how to gather and analyze data, and make sound business decisions to either cut what is not working or maximize what is.

Measuring marketing channel performance

Marketing channels are any medium or platform that allows you to reach your target audience for a product or service. You can reach your ideal customers through both digital and traditional channels. According to Indeed.com, there are a total of 9 major marketing channels. To get the most out of your reading, we will focus on the specific concept of measuring across any channel since it will impact all of them.

It is important to understand which marketing channel is best for your business before scaling. Every business sells differently. This difference extends beyond the product or service offered. It also includes the target audience and location. A marketing strategy that boosts one company’s ROI may not work for another. Think of a multi store retail operator versus a software as a service (SaaS) business to business organization.

As a professional with over 12 years in scaling revenue, I have seen first hand what successful organizations can achieve when maximizing high performance marketing channels. On the contrary, having experience scaling a digital marketing agency, serving thousands of retail and brand customers, I have also seen many abandoned high performance campaigns due to lack of experience digesting results.

Solution

Experiment to learn from mistakes and make improvements. You shouldn’t be afraid of running tests and spending the time to research. This will help you save more money rather than blindly following the example of your competitors. If you are running a digital campaign to drive top of funnel engagement, pay special attention to your website or landing page call to actions (CTA), form fills, and measure conversion.

If necessary, outsource marketing tasks. This will save you time and increase productivity. Keep track of your progress and receive advice from Project Managers who are experienced in running successful campaigns. Track all marketing channels, and analyze this data as it will help identify which channels need optimizing and which ones you need to cut. Readily available tools such as Google Analytics are at your disposal to facilitate measurement.

If you don’t already have a marketing platform set-up such as Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo, Active Campaign, consider setting one up. This will help you better understand lead conversion paths on your website, and lead routing internally to your organization. Such as which leads are warm and are handed over to sales, and how many of them convert to a customer. Determining this path is imperative as it will indicate how many touches a prospect requires before it engages, how many engagements it is required before it is considered a warm lead, how many touches by sales before it converts to pipeline, and how much pipeline you require to generate respective revenue. This data will ultimately lead you to your overall cost per acquisition per channel. You can repeat this process after each optimization and measure its performance increase.

You want to determine which of your advertising channels not only perform, but also can scale. Some marketing channels will deliver great results but won’t scale with your business. There is nothing wrong with a small marketing channel, but in order to scale your business you need various channels all producing to achieve the desired business goal. Therefore, identify a combination of marketing channels that will help you get there.

Compada is the first and most innovative Advisor network marketplace that brings you professionals with expertise in helping align your boldest business goals, while saving you time and money. Speak to a Compada Advisor with experience building, measuring, and optimizing marketing channels by emailing us at info@compada.io.