How to tell if your marketing is actually working

By Jo van Vuuren — Fractional CMO

The simplest way to tell if your marketing is working is to check whether it’s producing the outcomes your business actually needs, more enquiries, more sales, more of the right customers. Not how many likes, followers or website visits it generates. Those figures can look encouraging without ever turning into revenue. Start from the outcome, then work backwards. None of that means numbers don’t matter, they do, but only the ones connected to an actual result for the business.

Start from the business outcome, not the vanity metrics

Likes, followers and page views feel like progress, but none of them pay the bills. Before judging any marketing activity, ask what it’s meant to achieve for the business: more enquiries, more bookings, more repeat customers. Measure against that. If a campaign gets plenty of attention but no one gets in touch, it isn’t working, whatever the follower count says. It helps to write the outcome down before you start a new activity, so you’ve got something concrete to measure against once it’s finished, instead of judging on gut feel afterwards.

Do you know where your customers actually come from?

You don’t need expensive software to track this. A simple spreadsheet, or even just asking new customers “how did you hear about us?” and logging the answer, will tell you far more than guessing. Over time, patterns emerge: perhaps most enquiries come from word of mouth, or a particular page on your website, or one channel you hadn’t rated highly. That’s where to put your effort. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated, a simple column in a spreadsheet for “how did you hear about us” is enough to start spotting where your real enquiries come from.

Are you giving it enough time before judging it?

Marketing rarely works overnight. Some activity, like a well-placed advert, can bring quick results. Other activity, like building a reputation through content or word of mouth, takes months to show up in enquiries. Judging a new activity after a week or two is one of the most common reasons small businesses abandon things that would have worked given more time. Set a realistic checkpoint before you start, so you’re judging the activity against a fair timeframe, not however you happen to feel about it that week.

Busy versus effective: what’s the difference?

It’s easy to feel busy, posting regularly, sending emails, updating the website, without knowing whether any of it is actually bringing in business. Being busy means activity is happening. Being effective means that activity is leading to enquiries and sales. The only way to tell the difference is to track outcomes consistently and honestly, rather than judging by how much you’re doing. A useful question to ask yourself regularly is simple: what did this activity actually produce, in enquiries or sales? Not how much time it took up.

• Agree what outcome each marketing activity is meant to achieve, before you start
• Track enquiries and sales rather than likes or website visits
• Ask new customers how they found you, and log the answer somewhere simple
• Give each activity realistic time before deciding whether it worked
• Review the figures regularly, rather than relying on how busy things feel

You don’t need complicated reporting to do this well. A simple spreadsheet updated regularly, tracking where enquiries come from and what happened next, will tell you more than any amount of guessing. Start there, and build from it. Set aside twenty minutes once a month to look back over what came in and where it came from, it’s a small habit that pays for itself many times over.