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

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.

The 5 Signals Your Marketing Is Working

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.

Signal 1: Email Reply Rate & 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%.

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.

Signal 2: Email List Health Over Time

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.

Signal 3: Returning Visitors & Time on Page

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.

Signal 4: Content-Driven Conversations

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.

Signal 5: Contact Form Completions + Source

This last 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 on your site or in your messaging.

How to Put This Together

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.

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.