From Marketing Chaos to Marketing Clarity - Part I

Business owners, agencies and clients all face the same problem with marketing:

How do you know if it’s working?

On the client and business owner side, that question is framed as, “Am I spending money on the right marketing channels?” On the agency side, it’s, “How can I prove to my clients that these marketing efforts are working?”

The Main Problem: Business Owners Don’t Have Marketing Clarity

What if you knew exactly what was going on with your marketing? What if you had total marketing clarity?

Marketing clarity means knowing which marketing channels deliver the best leads, which channels you should spend more money on, and which channels simply aren’t working.

Without marketing clarity, you can’t answer any of these questions:

• Does my marketing work?
• If I spend more money, can I get more leads?
• Which of my marketing channels are working?
• Am I overspending on marketing?

Without marketing clarity, you end up launching marketing campaigns without knowing which ones work. There are a lot of problems with the current state of marketing analysis, and we'll touch on all of them below.

In Part II of this series, we’ll reveal how to solve all the issues we mention in this post. Sign up for our newsletter to receive Part I and Part II in your inbox!

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The Analytics Tool Issue

Without marketing clarity, you’re making decisions based on incomplete or misleading data.

Google Analytics is a go-to marketing analytics tool for a lot of business owners, but it produces a lot of incomplete and misleading data. Marketers should only use marketing tracking tools that help calculate ROI. Still, 54 percent of marketers don't know if their marketing technology investments are producing tangible business value.

Here's what we mean about making sure your technology helps you calculate ROI; if you want to know how many leads you received from Google CPC ads, Google Analytics can tell you that. Google Analytics cannot, however, show you how many of those leads are qualified. It also doesn’t allow you to assign sales value to leads, making it near impossible to calculate marketing ROI.

The ROI Issue

Every business spends money on marketing, whether it’s a small business website, a massive PPC campaign or a local dental office sending out postcards, money is being spent. Business owners want to know, is that spending worthwhile?

Marketing clarity is the ability to understand which marketing channels are worthwhile:

• Which channels drive leads?
• Which channels deliver ROI by delivering more sales than spend?
• Which channels simply don’t work?

To find this information, business owners need access to all the data surrounding their marketing efforts; from the marketing source to the conversion type to the final sales value. Without the right tools, finding that data takes up a lot of time.

The Time Issue

Business owners don’t have spare time, and while marketing is a priority, building a truly data-driven marketing strategy can seem like an unattainable goal. Maybe that's why just 16 percent of businesses use marketing analytics to inform their marketing strategy.

Measuring every marketing campaign might seem like it would take up all your time, but it’s actually a time saver.

When you don’t know which marketing campaigns work, you spend time creating new marketing campaigns instead of focusing on proven marketing methods. If you know which marketing campaigns work, you can save all the time that’s wasted on ineffective marketing.

By tracking campaigns to see which ones deliver the best leads and most ROI, you can confidently shift marketing spend towards those campaigns and repeat their success.

The Tracking Issue

In a time-pressed environment, business owners do what they can to capture marketing data. However most standard tracking tools are sorely lacking in detailed information.

Let’s say you can track form fills; every time someone fills out a form, you get an email. Maybe you’ve even used custom coding to show which marketing source delivered that form-fill.

But what if you want to look back a few months and see how many form-fill leads have turned into customers? What if you want to see revenue from leads who came from a Google Ad and then filled out a form? Google Analytics can’t tell you those answers. For that, you’ll need a tool that provides more data about every lead.

Even if you can see all that information for form-fills, you still have to track other conversions like calls and chats. Signing up for a call tracking tool helps, but doesn’t tie all your leads together or eliminate the need for disparate platforms and spreadsheets.

The Solution

Marketing clarity can only be achieved by capturing detailed information about every lead — giving you the ability to organize, qualify and value leads so you can produce smart reports that show actionable insights.

If you can do all these things, you'll know which marketing channels work, and you'll deliver better marketing results. For more on that, check back next week for Part II of our series on marketing clarity.

Click here for a free demo of WhatConverts - the key to marketing clarity