How Do I Know if My Marketing is Working?

The all encompassing reaches of technology has completely transformed the arena of marketing, and because marketing is oftentimes the first line of communication between a business and its customers, being able to convert your advertising into customer engagement is imperative.

Typical marketing strategies have been turned upside down. Partially because technology makes it so easy for ads to be blocked, which topples, or at the very least affects, outbound marketing – which is traditional advertising. An author with the Search Engine Journal (SEJ) may explain it best, “We don’t like to be sold to, we have our ad-blockers on, and we barely watch cable anymore” (McCoy, 2018).

So how do you know if your Internet and social media marketing is working? How do you know if the hard-earned money you spend on marketing is actually reaching your target market?

If you are a one-person and/or small business, an easy and free way to reveal if there are any obvious potential blind spots is to ask yourself, “When was the last time I had new customers come in because of my company’s social media?” If you don’t have a clear answer, then there is a good chance that you could be missing out on the true power of marketing - and by extension, missing out on potential profits.

This is because traditional advertising and marketing oftentimes fails to use the revolutionary tool of modern Internet and social media marketing: content marketing. Content marketing is quite different because it is inbound marketing (in stark contrast with outmoded outbound marketing). This means that its methods and practices are designed to streamline content, that is wanted and needed, to a specific target audience. The benefit of this non-traditional approach is that it focuses on “creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action” (McCoy, 2018).

After all, profitable and happy customers are what make business succeed.

References

McCoy, J. (2018). What is Internet Marketing? Your Guide to Today’s Online Marketing. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/internet-marketing/230047/