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6 Absolutely Essential Benchmarks to Gauge Your Marketing Success

Measure these areas to determine your marketing effectiveness.

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6 Absolutely Essential Benchmarks to Gauge Your Marketing Success

Many business owners believe that their marketing results are best measured by sales achieved — yet at the end of the day, marketing will not make anyone buy from you. You could have the best marketing in the world but poor location, ordinary inventory or underachieving staff can all conspire to stop the sales from happening.

So how do you measure marketing effectiveness? Here are six key benchmarks that can help gauge your marketing activity:

1. Door counter. If you don’t currently measure foot traffic, how do you know if your marketing is bringing you more customers?

2. Website traffic. Not all sales are generated in-store. Whether you have an online store or not, website inquiries are still a direct outcome of your marketing efforts. Measuring your monthly traffic will show whether you are gaining a greater share of the eyeball in your marketplace.

3. Social media following. Growing your social media following is not an end in itself, but it is a direct byproduct of the online activity you are doing to promote your business and how you are creating a two-way communication style with your customer base.

4. Email list. Is your email list growing? Despite the relative age of email in the digital environment, it still represents one of the most effective ways to communicate with customers and costs very little if anything to act on.

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5. Clienteling contact. How many customers do you reach out to every month? Marketing is no longer a passive game through recognized channels. You need to proactively contact customers and measure the effectiveness of this approach.

6. Keyword ranking. Part and parcel of your online efforts involving tracking the keywords you want to be found for. How do you rank each month? If you are halfway down page 2 for “diamond rings San Jose,” how does this compare to other months?

As you measure, you create questions that lead to actions. A drop in your email list can lead to a plan to increase email numbers. A static social media following raises the question, “What are we doing to attract and engage potential customers online?” A simple A4 sheet tracking each area monthly will help drive your business growth into the future.

David Brown is the president of Edge Retail Academy, a leading jewelry business consulting and data aggregation firm that provides expert business improvement plans to help with all facets of your business, including improved financials, healthier inventory, sales growth, increased staff performance, recruiting and retirement/succession planning, all custom-tailored to your store’s needs. They offer Edge Pulse to better understand critical sales and inventory data, to improve business profitability, benchmark your store against 1,200-plus other Edge Users, and ensure you stay on top of market trends with their $3 billion-plus of industry sales data. Contact (877) 569.8657, ext. 001, Inquiries@EdgeRetailAcademy.com or EdgeRetailAcademy.com.

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It Was Time to Make a Decision. It Was Time to Call Wilkerson.

Except for a few years when he worked as an accountant, Jim Schwartz has always been a jeweler. He grew up in the business and after “counting beans” for a few years, he and his wife, Robin, opened Robin James Jewelers in Cincinnati, Ohio. “We were coming to a stage in our life where we knew we have to make a decision,” says Jim Schwartz. He and Robin wanted to do it right, so they called Wilkerson. The best surprise (besides surpassing sales goals)? “The workers and associations really care about helping us move out own inventory out of the store first. It was very important to us.”

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