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Are You Accurately Tracking Your Marketing Efforts and ROI?

Are you accurately measuring your marketing ROI?

Whether you’re working with Rosewood or another marketing agency, you should read this blog from beginning to end.  We’re probably one of the only marketing agencies that will say this but, marketing is not something you should just keep dumping money into. Are you doing your part to measure your marketing ROI?

Most small businesses are running marketing strategies in some capacity.

  • Google Ads or BING Ads (Search Engine Marketing SEM),
  • Social Media Ads (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads),
  • Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
  • Video Marketing,
  • Backlinking campaigns,
  • PR Campaigns,
  • Radio,
  • Newspaper,
  • Periodicals,
  • Seminars,
  • Workshops,
  • etc.

No matter which one, you NEED to be tracking your ROI.

Online marketing makes it easy to measure TRAFFIC, but not necessarily CONVERSIONS.

Unless you are selling products via an online store, you can lose track of what happens from when someone visits your website or sees your ad, to if/when they actually convert into a customer.

The Solution? Get Back to Basics

This is where the onus is on you, the business owner.  We absolutely recommend that you have a client onboarding process in place that requires new clients to specify how they found you, or what made them ultimately convert. It’s as simple as asking them how they found you or having a short online survey that’s sent after initial contact or the first meeting.

Scenarios:

More than likely, it is a combination of marketing mediums:

  • Maybe their colleague mentioned you to them, they started doing some research about you, and then a few days/weeks later they see an ad and that’s what convinces them to call/visit you.
    • ROI came from Referrals x Google Ads (SEM)

 

  • Maybe they simply needed a quick solution, Googled you and saw your convincing Google Ad. They then went on your website and it established trust with them to reach out to you.
    • ROI came from Google Ads (SEM) x Website Content

 

  • Maybe it was solely a referral from a friend they trusted because of your excellent work.
    • ROI came from Referrals, Customer Retention & Nurturing

 

  • Perhaps they Googled a specific question, which your most recent article answered and showed up organically on the front page in Google Search Results.
    • ROI came from Organic SEO

Are You Using These Results to Improve Your Marketing Efforts and ROI?

Depending on what these results show, you should be tweaking your Marketing Campaigns to reflect them.

If your business is 90% referral based, think about how you can:

  • Improve your customer’s experience so they continue to refer you
  • Instate a referral program that rewards clients for their referrals
  • Create a Customer Retention and Nurturing campaign that keeps you top of mind and educates your existing clients on other services you provide. They may not need them but may know someone who does

In the coming weeks we’ll expand on the different marketing mediums that are available to small/medium businesses with Rosewood as your marketing partner. The great thing about us is that our plans are flexible. We meet with business owners quarterly to adjust their marketing strategy and make sure it reflects the data results and projections.

For more info & #inspo you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. And don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter as well!

Deanna

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The Importance of Google Analytics

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If you are a business owner or entrepreneur – chances are you heavily rely on the strength of your online presence and the traffic on your website to acquire clients and build your brand. Which is why it is with your best interest in mind that Rosewood recommends taking full advantage of Google Analytics! Google’s free web analytics service not only allows you to analyze in-depth detail about the visitors on your site, but it also provides valuable insights that can help you optimize the online strategy of your business.

Regardless of whether you run an e-commerce website or an informative blog, every business should understand and study the behaviour of their visitors to deliver better results. Keep reading for our reasons on why you should be regularly using Google Analytics to measure the success of your website – and by extension, your business as a whole.

Conversion Tracking

There is a feature which illustrates how many website conversions you have obtained by visitors on your site. It’s always great to know how many people have visited your site, and where they came from, but how do you know if those users are actually converting?

Google Analytics allows you to set up goals to track when a user completes a certain action on your site. Regardless of how many users each channel is driving to your site, it is essential to confirm that this traffic is actually converting.

Customer Engagement

Engagement metrics such as the bounce rate and average session duration can do wonders to show how well your website is performing. Google Analytics has a number of features that allow you to review how well users are interacting with your website and content. These metrics monitor different aspects of the customer journey, showing how the customer has interacted.

You can also view these statistics against individual pages, giving you a better idea as to what pages are doing well, and which may need optimizing to improve their user experience. Perhaps a page is taking too long to load, or there is too much text and not enough images – leaving the visitor impatient and uninterested. There may be hidden clues to these types of issues in the customer engagement metrics of your site.

Our Top Metrics to Keep an Eye on

  1. # of visitors on website
  2. Average visit length
  3. # of number of pages viewed
  4. Average time on page
  5. Most popular pages on your website
  6. Visitor demographics such as – gender, age, city location, etc.

Converting Data into Business Goals 

Google Analytics data on its own can tell you a lot about website performance. And this information can be very crucial to devising and improving your business plan moving forward. However, you must have a goal in mind for the data to be of use.

True performance tracking and improvement comes from comparisons on current results against previously set goals. Do you want people to get in touch? Download your how-to guide? Use specific goals to target what areas of your website you want to work on.

How Rosewood Can Help

Now that you’re sold on the many business benefits of Google Analytics – feel free to get in touch with us to see how your metrics can skyrocket with our support and training services. If you are new to the analytics world, fear not! We can happily show you the ins and outs of how to use and track the analytics metrics of your website.

And to briefly summarize, Google Analytics can monitor the effectiveness of your online marketing strategies, content, user experience, and functionality on your website. Once you identify any issues your site may have, Rosewood can help you create a solution. Google Analytics provides you with the information needed to improve your website, and we strategize to make it happen!

Questions or Comments? Get in Touch!

Until Next Time,

Ananta

Content Coordinator

Rosewood Inc.

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Digital Main Street: A Lifeline for Small Businesses

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There is something so iconic about a small main street business. It reminds one of a simpler time. They fill us with a sense togetherness, and truly serve as the heart of any community. But just because these small businesses might have a yesteryear feel doesn’t mean that their digital footprint should be lacking.

In a fast-moving digital culture, businesses of this nature have felt the threat from new shopping behaviors and technology. The Digital Main Street initiative was developed to aide these businesses and help them compete.

Created by the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas (TABIA) with direct support from the City of Toronto, Digital Main Street (DMS) is a program and service that helps main street businesses achieve that digital transformation they need; through the adoption of digital tools and technology. The program element of DMS uses an online learning platform with structured training programs for business owners. While the Digital Service Squad, a team of highly trained recent graduates, helps main street businesses navigate the ins and outs of services like e-commerce platforms or social media posting.

Top Notch Support

Funded by the Ontario government and supported by a group of strategic corporate sponsors, including Google, MasterCard, Rogers, Microsoft and Shopify, DMS is a lifeline for businesses that would otherwise struggle to keep up with their online counterparts.

The onboarding process to join DMS is completely free and includes a digital assessment and recommended to-do list. This list identifies the technologies and tools that can help businesses meet their digital goals. Once the assessment is complete businesses can gain access to tools like email marketing, content development, e-commerce, search engine optimization, and much more.

And these businesses also qualify to receive exclusive discounts from the hundreds of digital vendors that belong to the DMS community.

The Digital Main Street $2500 Grant

One of the most appealing aspects of this program is the possibility of being awarded a $2500 grant. Qualifying businesses can prepare an official application and be reviewed by

DMS. If approved, the small business receives a $2500 grant to use towards their digital marketing efforts – no strings attached!

Rosewood: An Official Digital Main Street Vendor

DMS truly is a useful service for any small business looking to gain a stronger online presence and base for their customers, and Rosewood is pleased to announce that we have been one of DMS’s official vendors from the very inception of this concept.

If you are looking for more information on what Digital Main Street is; what it could do for your business; or if you could qualify for the free $2500 grant, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to sit down with you and give you some more comprehensive information.

Here’s to your success,

Until Next Time,

Deanna

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