First, you need to be okay with never having a full picture. The brand world is not a direct-response world. Your goal is a never-ending one, it’s asking the question, “How can we mitigate the uncertainty and increase the confidence?” You will never achieve 100% accuracy. Brand, like most things in life and business, is more about art, timing, and luck than we want to admit.
So, now that we’re okay with uncertainty, how can we improve that confidence percentage? Here are a few ways I recommend measuring the success of your organic marketing efforts based on 12+ years of marketing experience:
- Is the percentage of your website traffic from organic/direct increasing?
- Is the percentage of your website traffic from branded keywords increasing?
- Is your engagement (follows, likes, views, clicks to website) improving across your organic social media accounts?
- Is your email engagement improving (signup rate, open rate, click-through rate, average revenue per email)?
- Is the number of organic PR hits increasing?
- Is the number of organic creators/influencers speaking about your brand/products increasing?
- Within your post-purchase survey, is the percentage of customers referencing your brand marketing efforts as the place they first discovered your brand increasing?
- Are your general business vitals and KPIs increasing?
- As a business owner/leader, what is your gut and intuition telling you? How does the pulse of the business feel?
I like to place the above into three buckets:
- First-party data
- Zero-party data
- Gut and intuition data
Now that you have your buckets, how do you make sense of it all? That’s the challenge that you, as a business or marketing leader, get paid the big bucks for. I recommend constantly updating your data, having an open mind, and not discounting that third bucket. I know, we all want to be “data-driven,” but if I may repeat myself, life and business are much more art than we like to admit. Here’s to being a better artist.
Happy Brand Building,
Joe