I wanted to have a chat about whether or not the money you are investing in certain areas of your business, is actually giving you the result or returns you desire.

One of the biggest challenges with this is business owners aren’t clear on the result they are trying to achieve in the first place

They have these muddled expectations so when they get a result they are overlaying it with what they think it might be or should be or what they dream it could be.

Firstly you need to get really really clear on the result you are looking for. So let me give you an example. If we are launching a marketing campaign, using the example of Facebook, you might set a target return on ad spend, so for every $1 we spend how much revenue are we generating or, for every $1 we spend how much profit are we generating? So setting this target gives you a yardstick to measure against.

The challenge with a lot of marketing or investment, is we are not looking at the right metrics to determine if we are getting the results we desire.

So what do you need to do?

1. Get super clear on what the goal is
2. Identify the metrics that align to that goal (you need to look at a combination or lead metrics and lag metrics. Lead metrics are those that come before the result, things like impressions, click, the number of ads running, the number of headlines you are looking at, the number of different audience types you are targeting, i.e all the things you can control. The things you can’t control are the lag measures. So once you have spent your money and you are looking at your cost per click, cost per lead for example)
3. Ensure you are tweaking your implementation strategy all the way through in order to get the desired result.

A mistake business owners make is they wait too long. For example they run a campaign, it runs for 2-4 weeks and only then they start looking at the stats and come to the realisation that its not going the way they want. 

So right at the start, you need to decide how regularly you are going check-in. For example Facebook, initially you will be trying to understand whether your new copy, your new angle is working, you need to be looking at that daily to see what’s going on. And the beauty of digital marketing and the like these days is we can get fast information back to us in order to be able to pivot and shift quickly. But you need to understand the key metrics to look at in order to be able to monitor success or failure. 

So, a quick recap:

1. Get super clear on what the goal is
2. Identify the success metrics that align with that goal
3. Ensure you have some kind of mechanism that allows you to monitor your key metrics at specific intervals so that you can understand, assess and make decisions from there