You know you should be measuring the value of your marketing, but you’re not sure how to go about doing that, exactly. Fortunately, marketing is a science, not a guessing game. You can measure it like you would anything else. Here’s how. 

Identify Your Revenue Attribution

Marketing companies, like Yodle.com, recommend that you focus on your revenue attribution when tracking and measuring sales and marketing investment. In other words, where do your sales come from? If you pump a lot of money into your Adwords platform, do you know whether it’s paying off? It is paying for itself? If you don’t know this, you should.

Likewise, you should have an understanding of the weighted-average ROI for all marketing and sales initiatives. So, If 60 percent of your marketing dollars are spent on pay-per-click, you should have a system in place to measure the total efficacy of your marketing dollars, with 60 percent weight given to the PPC platform.

You’ll also need to make sure that your shopping cart software is capable of integrating third party tracking scripts into the order completed web page to pass back sales metrics to your Adwords marketing platform to accurately track ROI.

Does all of this sound complicated? It can be, and that’s often why small businesses hire a marketing firm to do this for them. Marketing is a skill – a vastly under-appreciated skill. It’s not something that most people can successfully do all by themselves.

Coordinate Your Sales Team

Sales and marketing departments rarely talk to each other, even though they’re on the same team. Heck, their jobs depend on each other. So, show them exactly how dependent they are on each others’ successes. Tie compensation and bonuses to their counterpart’s success.

Show the sales department the impact they have on their marketing brothers, and vice-versa. Once each department fully understands the impact on the other, you can then better coordinate marketing dollars between the both of them. Instead of competing against one another, they will trade off finite marketing dollars and work together to allocate those dollars for maximum revenue and profits, regardless of how much each department gets.

Use Data To Drive Marketing

Sometimes, it’s hard to know what the data is telling you. It is, after all, just numbers on a screen. But, with that in mind, there are some things you can glean from your data sets. One of those things is the click-through rates on links, open rates of emails, sales, and visitor flow.

Of these, visitor flow is the least understood, but possibly the most helpful analytic you could measure and analyze. Visitor flow means how visitors move through your site. So, for example, if a visitor lands on your homepage, and goes to your “About” page, and then stops at your order page without ordering anything, something between the homepage and the “About” page prevented the sale.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the price was too much for the customer, but that raises the question: “why was the prospect not sold?” Maybe you need to sculpt your “About” page and homepage to better anticipate shopping cart abandonment or bouncing on the sales page. Maybe you could take the links to the sales page off the “About” page, if they’re there. Or, don’t allow people to click directly to the order page if they’re on the home page. Or, create a “pre-sell” on both pages or at least one of those pages.

Guest Author: Loretta Martinez Loretta has decades of experience in marketing. With innovations and trends keeping her busy, she often blogs about the basic tips and tricks to successful marketing plans.