Track the Online Metrics that Matter and Sales Isn’t One of Them
Unless you have all the clients you could possibly want right now you’ve probably heard you should be online marketing. That’s all well and good but how do you know if you’re doing the right thing or if what you are doing is actually benefiting your business in some way? As I meet more and more business owners in and around the area I hear a lot of chatter about frustrations and confusion regarding what to measure and keep track of online. The most frequent statement I get is, “I’m doing all of this online marketing but I’m not seeing an increase in sales.” Here’s a tip – sales is not the end-all, be-all measure of whether or not your online marketing efforts are working.
In order to say what you should track and measure it really depends on what your goals are and what you hope to achieve via your online marketing efforts.
If your ultimate goal is increased sales, you’ll want to track leads since more often than not the actual lead to sale conversion will take place offline and is not necessarily dependent upon your online marketing efforts, therefore your online marketing efforts could be considered successful when the extra leads begin trickling in. Hopefully the more leads you get, the more sales you get, but that’s up to you and how proficient you are at closing the deal.
Tracking leads however, may not be as cut and dry as it sounds. There are many more sub-goals, if you will, that need to be focused on in order for the leads to come.
If you want more leads your business needs to be found online when people are searching for your products and services – therefore one goal is to increase your search engine ranking. To do this, run searches for the keywords you ultimately wish to rank well for prior to the start of your online marketing initiatives that way you establish a baseline and can then track change in rankings.
Want more leads? Be seen as an industry expert with a goal of providing valuable information. It is important to track the information you push out to look for trends in the type of information that people are responding well to. Consider using a URL shortener with tracking features such as bit.ly – eventually you should be able to weed out the topics that folks aren’t interested in and share more about the topics that are getting the most views and interaction.
Another goal that one must strive for… Read more…
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Saying It Social, LLC provides Social Media Marketing & Local SEO Services for Franchisees & other Small Businesses.
“According to the Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93 percent of Americans expect companies they do business with to have a social media presence. And 85 percent believe a company should not only be present, but also interact with its customers via social media.”
We help your business to increase brand awareness, build relationships with and establish trust within your target market, be seen as an industry expert, provide exceptional customer service, increase customer retention, and increase search engine ranking all with the ongoing goal of generating more quality leads.
Saying It Social 
If you want to track social metrics and you’re using WordPress as a blogging tools check out WP-Stats-Dashboard:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-stats-dashboard/
Cheers,
Dave