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As a small business owner, getting the most from your digital marketing budget is essential. Budgets are small and tight and, often, when the budget is gone, it’s gone! As a result, you need to know exactly what you’re getting for your spending.
Many businesses believe that it’s impossible to properly and effectively track how your digital marketing efforts are working and what it’s delivering. While this may be true with traditional marketing, it’s possible to see exactly how many people are seeing your ad, who’s engaging and where they’re engaging through digital marketing reports.
You just need to know what to look out for and understand which activities are worth investing your budget in. Digital marketing should be a long-term strategy so it’s important to understand how it’s performing and how you can get the most from your budget.
It’s exactly how it sounds! Managing the return on your investment of any digital marketing strategy. Monitoring ROI will allow you to see which of your ads or campaigns are performing the best and help to inform your future strategy.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small business or a large business, knowing exactly how effective your digital marketing spend is is crucial to success.
When your budget is low, you don’t want to be investing in activities that are not effective. Having a close understanding of your activities will help you ensure you’re getting the most out of your small budget.
Understanding the return you’re getting from your digital marketing campaign will allow you to decide where to put your budget in the future.
If you’re not getting any return on investment from your digital marketing, it will show you where you can make changes. When you’re not getting a return, it can be tempting to cut digital marketing spend altogether.
However, sometimes it can take time to gain momentum on your campaigns and for them to deliver results. It can also take some tweaking and trialling different things before you find something that works perfectly for your business.
It can take up to three months to see an uplift, six months to start seeing some proper results and 12 months before you’re seeing a real return.
Read our blog - How long does it take digital marketing to work?
Of course, the return you’re seeing in terms of profit from your digital marketing is one of the main metrics you’ll need to track. However, this doesn’t tell you everything you need to know.
Here are some of the metrics we recommend tracking to measure the success of your campaigns:
There are a number of tools available to you for no or little cost to your business that allow you to track your results and return on investment.
Google Analytics is great for tracking a number of metrics and can help you analyse which of your activities are working and which aren’t.
No matter your industry, you can track metrics such as:
The tool allows you to understand where your website traffic is coming from, which pages are performing the best, and the demographics of the people that are visiting your website so you can refine your strategy.
Google Analytics is completely free - all you need to do is add a little bit of code in the backend of your website.
Hotjar is another great tool to help you understand what visitors are doing once they land on your site. If you’re driving a lot of traffic but your sales aren’t increasing, this is a good time to have a look at Hotjar.
The free plan should provide you with the information you need to start making changes to your website and increasing those all-important conversions.
Ahrefs is a paid tool but it’s well worth investing in. It’s an SEO tool that will show you what keywords your site is ranking for and in which positions. You’ll also be able to have a look at where your competitors are too so you can benchmark your website.
Google Search Console can work alongside Google Analytics to help you understand what’s working well and what isn’t.
Again, it’s completely free and all you need to do is configure it on your site which a developer should be able to help you do. Or, if you’re working with a freelancer or agency, they should be able to help you too.
Yes, any good digital marketing freelancer or agency should be able to show you what you’re achieving through your spending with them.
Ideally, you should have access to the digital marketing dashboard that highlights the data that’s important to you and your business. It’s for you to see as well as the freelancer or agency!
When you start working with someone external to your business, make sure you work closely with them so they understand which digital marketing metrics are most important to you and your business and the frequency with which you’d like to monitor them.
When you make a start with digital marketing, or if you’ve tried it before, we recommend measuring a few key metrics to begin with. How about looking at increasing traffic to your website? You’re not going to start gaining conversions straight away, so measure the elements you can increase first and go from there.
Working with a third party will help with tracking and measuring the ROI of your campaigns because they should have a full understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and what you can expect to see when achieving it.
We offer two digital marketing packages that are based on results we’ve driven for small businesses like yours in the past. We’ve found a formula that works and we want as many small businesses to dip their toes into digital marketing as possible.
These packages will help you to get your strategy off the ground and start driving results for your business.
If you’d like a digital marketing package that works for you, take a look at our exclusive small business digital marketing packages.