What Happens After the Click: How Marketing Depends on Data

There are many reasons that small business owners might be hyper vigilant over their marketing budget. Unlike a utility bill that can be reconciled to the exact amount of energy used, marketing costs can’t always be directly linked to user actions that lead to a sale. With today’s digital tools, however, the link between marketing strategy and sales can be easier to verify. It will never be a perfect science, but we can track lead behavior and look for trends that correlate to various marketing activities.

Business owners and marketing professionals have equal access to the tools that track marketing effectiveness. While marketing agencies may be in the better position to review and interpret marketing results, business owners should pay attention also to make sure their sales process flows seamlessly from them. Tracking incoming leads and their outcomes is vital to making the most efficient and effective use of your marketing budget.

Keep Track of Your Incoming Client Leads, Even if You Don’t Sign Them as Clients

Internet tracking tools can tell you a lot about how people arrive on your website and what they do once they are there. With a simple report, business owners can see exactly how many people searched their business name, clicked on a paid ad, followed a link from social media, or chose their organic link from search results. Those are just numbers, though. You don’t know anything about those actual people yet. 

You can learn real information about website visitors when they:

• Click on a button to call directly

• Fill out a contact form 

• Submit a request for quote

• Give you their email address in exchange for a lead magnet 

• Schedule a discovery meeting

Once you reach that layer of connection with a lead, it is absolutely necessary to your business and marketing success to do something with it. This is where marketing professionals sadly find too many of our service-based business clients to be ill-equipped. If we are going to develop a strong marketing strategy, we need to know what happens to clients and potential clients through every stage of the marketing and sales process.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is the standard tool for keeping track of incoming leads and existing clients. There are a lot of big, expensive CRM systems available, and this can be daunting for small businesses who don’t feel they have enough contacts to justify the monthly cost.

I agree that a fancy software service is not the right choice for most small businesses. In reality, a CRM can be as basic as a well-organized spreadsheet. There are dozens of options that fall somewhere in between the two extremes, as well. 

The bottom line is that every business needs to keep track of leads if they want to find out what type of marketing works and do more of it.

One of the reasons why I strongly suggest recording and tracking lead information is because many business owners rely too heavily on their perception of reality. For example, they may have talked with two prospects that called in after receiving a direct mailer and those prospects were really not great fits. Those two frustrating conversations might outweigh the five or six more positive, but less memorable, conversations with other prospects who received the same mailer. The negative memory stands out more, therefore the business owner comes to the conclusion that the mailer was not effective. In reality, however, when considering all the data, the efficacy of that marketing activity is better than they realized. This is why keeping track and reviewing hard numbers is an important part of marketing analytics. Qualitative analysis also has a role, but it needs to be paired with quantitative.

Effective Marketing Finds Out What Happens at Every Stage of the Client Journey

Any business owner with just a little bit of experience is aware that potential clients leave the sales process at all different stages for many different reasons. Of course we hope that every lead turns into a sale, but even the leads that do not become clients can deliver valuable information about your marketing.

It’s impossible to make adjustments, though, if you are not keeping track of how they come to be aware of your business, how far they get, and at what point they leave. This information tells you and your marketing team a lot about whether or not you are reaching your intended audience and meeting their expectations. As the business owner, it is especially hard to interpret their behavior on your own. Losing a lead is frustrating, and sometimes it stirs up emotions that cloud your ability to analyze the steps. 

Your marketing agency offers an objective perspective that can continually improve the customer journey, resulting in more sales to ideal clients. But we can only do this if we are able to compare what we see digitally to what you navigate in reality. Your CRM is crucial to this aspect of our working relationship. 

By viewing the big picture that includes entry and exit behavior of leads, we can drill down on what might be having an effect on their decisions. These are some examples of what we might discover after taking a close look at how potential customers interact with your marketing:

• The website is jarringly different than the social media aesthetic, creating a disconnect in the user experience

• There are no blogs or service pages that match the high intent keywords bringing users to the website

• The target demographic is not as aligned on the cost of the service as originally expected

• The website, or even the verbal sales process, is not optimized for a call to action that leads to a sale

• Form submissions are not getting to the right inbox, or there is not a clear follow-up process, leaving people who are interested hanging out high and dry

Sometimes, the issue lies within the actual marketing activity because the audience is not correctly defined for the service. But it is also very common for marketing professionals to identify missed opportunities directly on the website or even in the discovery call setting that can be tweaked for better outcomes. Our ability to view your client data allows us to offer deeper support and guidance that brings you ideal clients.

Every Lead Tells You Something About Your Marketing

Although keeping track of leads who do not become clients may feel like a waste of time, I promise that it is necessary for building a robust marketing strategy that lands more clients. Try to avoid the mindset that a lead who does not turn into a sale should be disregarded completely. Every lead comes with a trail of information that can make your marketing better. And outside the data aspect, some leads who don’t become clients are simply not ready yet! They may be future clients, but only if you know how to stay in front of them.

If your marketing efforts feel like a waste because you can’t tell where anyone is coming from, it’s time to develop a tracking system. Start simple and track what you can, adding more metrics as they become clear. Once you have some data, your marketing plan will start coming together.

If you don’t have any idea where to start, or your current marketing team is not sharing analytics with you, please reach out to me. At Marketing to Mission, we view marketing as a process that supports your business, and we apply tools that help keep you informed and involved. To begin working on a marketing strategy that makes connecting with your ideal client much simpler, schedule a discovery call with me.