If you don't know how customers are finding your business, you can't confidently know which marketing activities are working. Asking customers where they heard about you and reviewing your marketing data can reveal what's driving enquiries, sales and growth.
How did you find us?
It sounds simple, but many businesses don't consistently ask it.
You might know that business is going well. You may have more customers, a growing team and a steady stream of enquiries. But if you don't know where those customers came from, you're missing an important part of the picture.
Without understanding how people discover your business, it's difficult to evaluate your marketing, communications and business development activities.
You need to know what's working, what's not, what you should do more of, what you should do less of, and where there may be opportunities to improve.
A healthy flow of customers can make it tempting to assume your marketing is doing its job.
But there is a big difference between getting customers and understanding why you're getting customers.
If enquiries are coming in, ask:
These questions can start to reveal the journey people are taking before they become customers.
Understanding your customer acquisition sources helps you make better marketing decisions.
If you know that a significant number of customers are coming through referrals, for example, that's useful information. If your website is generating consistent enquiries, that's important to understand too.
Likewise, if you're spending considerable time creating social media content but very few enquiries can be traced back to it, you may need to rethink the role that activity is playing.
The goal isn't necessarily to stop doing something simply because it isn't producing immediate enquiries. Instead, the goal is to understand the role each activity is playing and make decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions.
Every business has limited:
That means you can't afford to blindly invest resources into marketing activities without understanding their contribution.
The more clearly you can see what's happening, the easier it becomes to prioritise.
Asking customers how they found you is one of the simplest ways to gather useful information, but it shouldn't be the only source of insight.
Your existing marketing data can help build a much bigger picture.
Depending on your business, this might include:
These different data points can help you understand how people are discovering, researching and eventually choosing your business.
Someone might discover your business through a Google search but not contact you immediately.
They might visit your website, follow you on social media, read an article, receive an email and then eventually make an enquiry.
If you're only looking at the final enquiry, you may miss everything that happened beforehand.
That's why it's important to consider the customer journey, not just the final conversion.
One of the biggest problems with marketing measurement is assuming you know what's working.
You might think:
"We get a lot of business from social media."
But do you know that for certain?
Or perhaps you believe most customers find you through Google. Again, what does the data actually tell you?
Your customers may give you a different answer.
This is why combining customer feedback with digital marketing data is so valuable. One tells you what customers say happened, while the other can help show what they're doing.
Together, they provide a more useful picture.
The purpose of measuring your marketing isn't to create reports for the sake of having reports.
The information should help you make better decisions.
Once you understand where customers are coming from, you can ask:
If a particular channel consistently contributes to enquiries or sales, investigate why it's working and whether there's an opportunity to invest further.
If an activity is consuming significant resources without contributing to your objectives, it may be time to reconsider how you're using it.
Sometimes an activity isn't failing — it simply isn't performing as well as it could.
Small changes to your messaging, offer, targeting, website experience or calls to action may make a difference.
If the evidence shows that something isn't contributing to your marketing objectives, don't be afraid to change direction.
Marketing isn't about doing the same things forever. It's about learning, adjusting and improving.
You don't need to track every possible metric.
The important thing is to identify the information that helps you understand how people are finding your business and what happens between discovery and conversion.
Start with the basics.
Ask every new customer how they found you.
Then look at your website, social, email and other marketing data to identify patterns.
Over time, you'll build a clearer picture of which activities are helping people discover your business, engage with your brand and ultimately become customers.
If you're unsure whether your current marketing is actually working, get in touch with Little Marketing and let's talk about what you're currently doing and what the data is telling you.
If you want to know whether your marketing is working, start by understanding how customers are finding your business.
Ask the question, look at the data and follow the customer journey from discovery through to enquiry and purchase. When you know where your customers are coming from, you can make more informed decisions about where to invest your marketing time, money and energy.
After 18 years of helping small businesses make sense of their marketing, we've seen the value of getting the fundamentals right before simply adding more activity.
Because the goal isn't to do more marketing. It's to understand what's working and why, so you can make better marketing decisions.
Little Marketing — 18 years of helping small businesses make their marketing work harder.
Talk to Little Marketing about your marketing or explore our related article on why marketing activity isn't always the answer.