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Get a Quote Today!How to Self-Assess Your Digital Marketing Success

Business owners looking to understand how successful their digital marketing activities have been have a wealth of tools at their disposal. These include free tools such as Google Analytics, for analysing website traffic, user journeys, and conversions, tools with free and paid options such as Hootsuite, and premium tools such as those offered by Adobe.
If you are a small business, both time and money are likely to have a high value and be in short supply. At the same time, even if a business owner decides to use a free tool, the chances are that they are going to be limited in the value they are able to get out of it, given the time needed to really look at something like Google Analytics data in any level of detail.
We would never advocate using the self-assessment method of measuring digital marketing success; an evidence and fact driven approach is always the best way to understand what is happening with your website. However, we understand it isn’t always possible for business owners to take the “right” approach.
Here are some of your options for self-assessment. Remember to consider any additional marketing avenues that you’re using in addition to digital ones. If you’re not advertising anywhere but online, then you can attribute all of your success to your digital marketing efforts.

You’re Being Contacted
The first measure of marketing success is always people getting in touch with you. Actually, it’s people talking about you, but there probably isn’t a way to self-assess this short of eavesdropping on conversations.
If you’re being contacted through a contact form on your website, by email, or by telephone, then you must be doing something right. If you’ve taken a specific action relating to your digital marketing and then your contact numbers increase, you can view that as a positive result.
People are Visiting You
While a business’s digital activities are often all about finding and converting customers online, it can be forgotten that some businesses simply use their website as a brand front, and ultimately would prefer to convert their customers offline.
If your website features a strong call to action and a clear message that makes people visit you, sit back and marvel in your digital efforts.
It is worth having a system in place at your location, be this a shop, a bar, or even somewhere like an art gallery, to ask people how they discovered you, just so you can better measure your success. This can be something as simple as a leaflet, which you can also use for data capture to build a mailing list for additional marketing purposes.

You’re Selling
Ultimately, the bottom line is the bottom line! If you’re seeing an increase in sales and your customers are telling you they found you through your website (or are buying through your website), then clearly your digital marketing is working.
If you are invested in any digital marketing activities like blogging or you implement some SEO principles yourself, consider the time and money you spend in order to ascertain whether your activities are profitable and worthwhile.
At some point, your business will reach a point where you need to be working with evidence and data, or you’ll decide yourself that you’ll only ever grow if you’re not basing what you do on such simplistic performance metrics. If you need assistance with setting up tools like Google Analytics, Bough Digital offers a complete service that involves full analysis of your website traffic, conversions, and other metrics, in addition to on-going consultation to assist you in making the changes you need.
Contact us now to get out of self-assessment and start making digital marketing decisions based on hard cold facts!