Must-Know Tips to Measure Your Auto Repair Marketing Success
If you’re investing money into your auto repair shop’s marketing efforts, you want to know that the return on investment is worth it, right?
Success will look different depending on your digital marketing efforts. To understand success, small business owners should create goals they want to achieve from the marketing tactics. Whether it’s more website visitors, higher conversion rates or more leads, you can’t know what’s working without tracking the results.
If you’re focused on bringing in more revenue, you want to track the revenue increase and where that revenue is coming from. The new sales could come from new leads from your digital marketing efforts or customer referrals.
If you’re not tracking your lead generation efforts, it’s hard to know what’s working and what’s not. To grow your business, measuring your marketing effectiveness is critical.
How do you know if your marketing strategy is working?
The only way to know if your marketing strategy is working is to track your progress. Creating goals based on your marketing efforts will help you determine your success.
If you do not set measurements for success from the beginning, it’s challenging to determine if you have achieved what you set out to do.
Here are some examples of goals you could make and the marketing metric to go along with them:
- Overall website traffic: This goal would exclusively look at website visitors. You could set a goal to increase month-over-month traffic by 10%.
- Social media followers: This is the number of social media users following your company on any given platform. Followers aren’t the only metric; you could also look at engagement and how often people comment on your posts.
- Leads captured: This metric may be based on a contact form on your website or the number of new customers who found you from a marketing source.
Tips for measuring marketing success
Tracking your marketing success helps keep your business running and gives small business owners peace of mind. Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts takes a little work, so here are a few tips to help you.
Define success
The first piece of measuring your marketing efforts is understanding what success looks like and creating achievable goals around that success metric. By first figuring out what success means, you’ll clearly understand how your marketing efforts are performing. These key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you see if you are achieving marketing success.
Determine how and what to track
After you understand how you’ll define success, you need to figure out how to track those metrics. Sometimes, it may be as simple as logging in to Google Analytics or your account on a social media platform.
In other cases, you may want to do more calculations to understand the acquisition cost or cost per qualified lead. If you’re focused on search engine optimization (SEO), tracking how your website ranks for certain keywords may be helpful.
Analyze and adapt
Now, you just need to watch the marketing efforts work and use your metrics to gauge success. Wait a period of time before you make any changes, so you give the marketing efforts time to work. With digital marketing, you can analyze and adapt more quickly based on the results.
If you’re trying an email marketing campaign, evaluate open rates and click-through rates after each email and make changes to see if the metrics improve. No matter the marketing tactic, measuring success helps you get a better return on investment.
What should you do if your marketing strategy isn’t working?
A significant part of successful marketing is knowing when to pivot and try something different. If your marketing efforts aren’t stacking up, what should you do?
Once you know that your marketing efforts aren’t meeting your goals, act quickly to analyze and understand why the tactics are not working. With digital marketing, you can pause your ad spend, update your social media profiles and make changes to your website easily.
If you’re not getting as many leads from a contact form or the phone isn’t ringing enough, put yourself in the customer’s shoes and see if you can identify any issues in your marketing efforts that may be dampening success. It could be a simple typo that decreases the leads coming in.
What are a few easy ways to improve your marketing reach?
Knowing your customer is one of the best ways to improve your marketing efforts and expand your reach. Understanding where your customers are, their thinking and what they expect from an auto repair shop will help you be more effective in your marketing.
Listen to feedback
One way to get to know your customer better is to listen to customer feedback. You can do this through customer satisfaction surveys, by reading customer reviews and talking to them about their experience.
This feedback will help you understand how to better communicate with your target audience so that you can be more successful in your marketing efforts.
Allocate your budget efficiently
You must spend your marketing budget on the most effective marketing channels to expand your marketing reach. Evaluate your digital marketing strategies and the ROI they bring to your local business.
When something isn’t working, be quick to pause and reassess if it is the right marketing tactic for your business. By managing your marketing costs, you’ll be able to increase the success of your marketing when it’s working and control the damage when it’s not.
Take the guesswork out of marketing with Broadly
Managing your marketing efforts and tracking your success can be daunting. If you want to monitor the KPIs of your marketing plan while still giving your business 100%, it may be time to find a marketing partner that can help.
Broadly works with companies like yours to help them see the success marketing can bring. Schedule a demo today!