VIth Sense: If You Want to Track Marketing Results, Listen to Your Customers
The modern marketer believes that marketing is so much more difficult today than ever before. There’s no captive audience watching one of four networks during primetime. There’s no printed circular that bumps your sales each Wednesday. No radio remote- broadcast from your store where people flock to meet the deejay and maybe get a free t-shirt. No e-mail blast that overloads your website. Man, it’s hard… until you start listening to your prospect.
Listen To Your Target Audience
Your target prospect will tell you exactly how to get them to buy what you’re selling. All you have to do is what they’re telling you. They will tell you exactly which keywords to include on your website and which to invest in on search engines. They’ll tell you what type of blogs get their attention, what video content attracts them to your brand, and what social media platforms you need to be active on. Your target will tell you what they want to see in a newsletter from you, what time of day you should run your radio ads, and which websites you should place your ads on. You just have to listen to them.
Your next customer will tell you what they like about your direct competition, and what they don’t like about you. And vice versa. They will tell you which promotions get them interested, and which ones get them to buy. They’ll tell you which headline you should use, and which image appeals to them. They’ll even tell you where the information fields on your landing page should be located. Just listen.
Measure Your Marketing Efforts
So, you’re ready to listen to them now, right? That means that you’re ready to measure your marketing efforts. And you’re ready to improve them each and every day. Here’s a short list of listening activities that will put money in your pocket:
- Monitor which key words get clicked on, yes… AND which actually lead to an additional action on your website. You have to decide what you want that action (conversion) to be.
- Monitor which content gets read/viewed/downloaded the most. That means your prospect finds it valuable. It’s good for your brand to produce content that people consume. Make more of that kind.
- Measure the engagement with your social posts. Know what gets liked and shared the most. Do more of that stuff.
- Measure the open rate of your newsletter. It needed a good headline to get a lot of interest. Write more headlines like that. And measure which articles got clicked so they could be read/viewed. Your prospect likes those and it took them to your website.
- Put vanity/custom phone numbers or website URLs in your offline ads. They’ll tell you the channel, date, time, and message that caused the target to respond. And which didn’t. Do more of the former and none of the latter.
- Serve different ads to members of the same target profile. Only continue with the one that performed the best.
- Use heat maps on your website. It tells you where people’s attention goes and where they spend the most time. Make sure that stuff is the easiest to find.
Marketing today is only hard if you’re not listening. So sit up, pay attention, and measure your efforts. Your prospect will teach you how.
