How to Tell If Your Small Business’s Marketing Is Actually Working

Short answer: You can tell your small business marketing is working when it consistently moves people closer to trusting you or buying what you offer. That can show up through email engagement, returning website visitors, content-driven conversations, inquiries and, ultimately, new clients.

When every minute of your day is dedicated to serving your clients, managing cashflow, closing new contracts, and making sure you also have some semblance of a personal life, you don’t have time to guess what marketing is and isn’t working for you.

No matter how you slice it, marketing does require time in your schedule. But that does NOT mean you have to waste time spinning your wheels wondering what’s helping you bring in new leads or moving prospects into paying clients.

Why Most Business Owners Focus On the Wrong Numbers

Whether we’re talking about social media or email lists, many business owners fall into the vanity metrics trap where follower or subscriber number overshadows all others.

While there can be some advantages that come with having higher numbers on your various marketing channels (access to certain features and monetization opportunities, for example), they’re not the only metric that matters.

After all, what use is it to have thousands of followers on Instagram or subscribers on your email list if they’re not engaged? (Answer: none)

Instead of focusing on “how many people saw it?” the real question to ask is “did it move someone closer to trusting me or buying what I offer?”

Stop focusing on activity and start focusing on intent.

The good news is you don’t need to spend hours analyzing a fancy dashboard full of data to see if your marketing strategy is doing this work, either. There are five key signals to pay attention to when you’re evaluating whether or not your marketing is working.

What Marketing Metrics Should a Small Business Actually Track?

The best marketing metrics for a small business are the ones that show whether people are moving from awareness to engagement to inquiry. You don’t need to track every number available to you – that will make you go cross eyed.

You need to track the ones that help you understand whether your marketing is moving potential clients closer to taking action.

For most service-based small businesses, those signals include email engagement, email list health, returning website visitors, content-driven conversations and contact form or RFP completions.

If your marketing efforts are spread across countless programs and platforms, here’s a quick reminder that you can bring in revenue with just three marketing assets:

1. email marketing system
2. content creation,
3. and your website.

Let’s dive into each of those for the five signals that will tell you what’s pulling its weight and what’s dead weight.

What Email Metrics Show that Your Marketing Is Working?

Email marketing is working when subscribers aren’t just receiving your emails, but engaging with them through opens, clicks, replies, forwards and direct inquiries.

Open and click rates are a great indicator of email list health and engagement. They are the primary email metric the DCM Krewe tracks for ourselves and for clients.

But there’s a caveat now:

Privacy changes with iOS in the last few years have changed the reliability of open and click rates a bit, so they’re not always 100% accurate.

Even still, we find great value in measuring and maintaining this baseline as a good indicator of major shifts and changes in your subscribers’ behavior.

A quick look across the internet shows that standard email open rate is 15-20% and click rate is 2-5%.

BUT…rather than comparing your results to a single email benchmark agnostic of industry, start by establishing your own baseline and watching for changes over time.

Email performance can vary considerably by industry, audience and type of email, and privacy changes have made open rates less reliable than they once were.

Every industry varies though, so be sure to check your specific industry to get an accurate baseline. If your stats aren’t even close, don’t stress about it. You now have a baseline to grow from! Bit by bit, you can work to improve your results. (These resources will help.)

However, there are other strong indicators of whether email is working for your marketing strategy.

Replies and forwards and (even better!) those moments when someone says “I saw your last email and wanted to reach out” are priceless.

How Do You Know If Your Email List Is Healthy?

A healthy email list isn’t necessarily a large email list. A smaller list of people who consistently engage with your content is more valuable than a large list of subscribers who never open, click or respond.

You’ve hopefully moved past taking every unsubscribe as a personal affront, but here’s some further encouragement.

Unsubscribes? They’re not always a bad thing.

The goal with your email list isn’t to have the most subscribers. It’s to have the most engagement.

If someone is consistently sending your hard work to trash, then you don’t want them on your list. A smaller, yet engaged, list beats a bloated dead one every time.

The important thing to note here is that you’re not losing half your list with one email.

That might indicate another type of problem.

A slow decline in subscribers over a 90 day period where you’re focusing on cleaning up your list, signals a healthy trend.

What Website Metrics Show That Your Marketing is Working?

Website traffic is only part of the picture. Returning visitors and time spent on your website can help show whether you’re attracting the right people and whether your messaging is giving them a reason to stick around.

Hopefully, you have a website and you have GA4 (Google Analytics) set up on it. If not, let’s fix that now shall we?!

Once you’re under the hood, you’ll find all sorts of numbers and views that will likely feel overwhelming.

But tracking Returning Visitors and Time On Page can be a solid indicator of how well both your messaging and site are functioning.

If someone comes back to your site multiple times, that signals you’re relevant. And if they spend longer than a minute on a page, that’s a good sign that people are resonating with that page’s message.

How Can You Tell If Your Content Is Generating Leads?

One of the strongest signs your content is working is when people reference it in real-world conversations, on their social media (posts or DMs) or in inquiries you receive.

Those interactions may not appear neatly in your social media analytics, but they absolutely count as marketing results.

While your email service provider or social media channel provide their own metrics, there are some that they can’t measure.

If you’re hearing “I read your article and…” when talking to people, that moment is a KPI and deserves to be tracked and attributed in your CRM and shared with your marketing team.

Tracking this type of comment or interaction involves a bit more effort & discipline since it’s less built-in than other metrics, but the importance of ensuring marketing & sales departments are talking to one another cannot be understated.

How Do You Know Which Marketing Channels are Driving Inquiries?

Contact form completions, direct emails referencing your content, or DMs are one of the clearest signs that your marketing is generating action. Tracking where those inquiries came from helps you understand which marketing channels are contributing to actual leads, not just attention.

This first one may seem super obvious, but you’d be surprised how often it is overlooked.

If people are completing your contact form, that is a direct signal that what you’re putting out there is working.

The other part of this equation is tracking the source of any form completions. Knowing whether new leads came from a referral, directly, or organically will tell you when to double down, tweak, or discontinue something in your marketing. (NOTE: this can all be found in GA4 too.)

One red flag to look out for is seeing lots of traffic to your website with no conversions. That signals that something may be broken, either in your messaging or the contact or RFP forms.

How Often Should a Small Business Review Marketing Results?

You don’t need to review your marketing results every day, which is a bit like watching a pot of water and waiting for it to boil. Monitor your numbers monthly, while also looking at trends quarterly and YoY before making major strategic decisions.

Even tracking five signals can still feel overwhelming sometimes, but keep in mind that these are not indicators that need babysitting every day of the week.

Staring at them daily, or even weekly, will likely leave you a bit frazzled or looking too closely in the weeds 😵‍💫 Remember that a trend over time (i.e. no less than quarterly) beats any single data point so hold on the panic button and focus on diagnosing the root cause first.

What If You’re Marketing Consistently but Still Aren’t Getting Leads?

If you’re consistently marketing your business but aren’t generating qualified leads, doing more marketing isn’t automatically the answer. The problem may be your strategy, messaging, audience, website or the path you’re giving potential clients to take next.

Look back at the five signals above to diagnose where the disconnect is happening. If you’re doing #allthethings but still can’t tell what’s actually moving the needle, that may be a sign it’s time for an outside perspective.

Not sure what your numbers are telling you? This is exactly what we dig into with clients. Book a discovery call and we can tell you what we see.