There are a variety of ways to measure what digital marketing tactics are working and those that arent. From conversions to impressions, there are many metrics to measure and that can be very challenging.  To help decide if something is working or not, Manish Patel from Where2GetIt and Perry Evans from Closely gave some insight into this discussion.

Manish shared some tips on what to do and look for when grading your own business’ performance by mapping the customer journey – step into the shoes of your customer and understand the entire path from how consumers find you to how they make a purchase.  This will require that you gather relevant data including the following:

• Your brand and what consumers value in it
• Your customers and what they need
• Your competitor and what their strengths and weaknesses are
• Industry influencers – who they are and how they can help or hurt you

In measuring what is working, looking at industry averages may not be the best measurement for you.  Instead, benchmark based on a starting point from your own data.  Then measure improvement from there.  Also, understand the difference between a digital signal that is relevant to you and noise that doesn’t affect you.

Perry shared four building blocks of local performance:

1. Get Found
   • Presence – assess your quality
     • Claim your pages in all critical places where consumers might discover you
     • Keep your data consistent and up to date
   • Get the basics right
     • Customer contact details and techniques
     • Answer on your site what you do, where you do it,  when you’re open, how to buy

2. Look attractive
   • Be aware of how you look when you’re being comparison shopped
   • Track and compare on key word of mouth elements
     • Social audience
     • Campaign engagement
     • Customers reviews
     • Inbound chatter
   • Look good to the mobile 50%
3. Grow customer value
   • Now is the ideal time to have/get a clean customer list.
   • Data driven marketing automation delivers highly measureable online-offline ROI if you can connect customers to transactions.  E-commerce is easily measurable.
   • Cull your customers into “best customer” lists to create high efficiency campaigns.
4. New customer growth
   • Search marketing is still number 1 for connecting with shopping customers.  Grade your performance to optimize your spend.
   • A new crop of FB campaign performance tools are forming that make it easier and more measurable.  Likely to have a local search product soon.  So if you invest in it now (content), it will make converting later much easier.