Today we’re going to talk about, if you know when and how you know if your online marketing is working. A lot of people are doing lots of different things online. There’s Facebook ads which are super awesome, Instagram ads, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, search engine marketing. There’s just all kinds of ways for you to market online. You probably want to know if it’s working. You want a return on your investment.

This is something that we strive for in business, in marketing, and sales. If we’re going to spend any time or money, you’re going to need to figure out if that’s getting you anything back. If you’re not getting a return on your investment, then you probably should be spending your time or your money on other things.

To understand return on investment, you first have to figure out what your baseline is. Where are you starting from? If you’re trying to attract more visitors to your website, how many visitors are you getting? If you’re trying to get more visits to your Facebook page, how many visits are you getting? If you’re trying to get people to opt in for an eBook or something else, you still need to figure out where you’re starting from. If you’re starting from zero, great. If you’re not starting from zero, great. You have to understand where you’re starting from. It’s hard to measure if you don’t know where you started.

Then you have to figure out what your goal is. This can be tricky. This can be tricky because Facebook ads, just for example, offer you lots of different goals. Your goals may change over time. Your goals may change from here to there. You have to figure out first, what are you trying to accomplish my spending this time or money? Are you trying to get more people on your list? Are you trying to get them to opt into an offer? Are you trying to get them to buy? What is your goal? Be very specific about goals, because otherwise, again it’s hard to measure.

Then you have to figure out what are you willing to invest? Right now, it’s pretty, it is a low barrier to entry to start investing a lot of time into online marketing. You can do all of your own Facebook ads. It’s not rocket surgery people. You can totally do it. You can do your own Instagram ads. You can do your own pay-per-click marketing. You can do your own pay-per-click marketing. You can do your own SEO. All of the information’s out there available to you. You can totally choose to do this yourself. Are you willing to invest the time or would you rather invest the money?

Hire an expert and it becomes a choice. It becomes a business decision at that point about what you want to do. Is it better to invest your time, increase your expertise, get to know it, and do it a little bit? Is your time more valuable spent other places, providing the services in your business or working on other marketing activities, and you can pay somebody money and get this off the ground faster and get a return on your investment? Back to return on your investment. You have to figure out what you’re willing to invest.

Then finally, you have to measure it. Once you know what your goal is and what your baseline is, then you need to be checking in. With online marketing, really hours, days, you’re checking in very quickly to figure out if things are working. With Facebook ads, you don’t want to just put one Facebook ad out in the world. You don’t really want to just put one Facebook ad out in the world, and go, “Mm, I hope it works.” You have the opportunity to do a whole campaign with three different ads and within hours, sometimes minutes, but hours you’ll know which ones working better than others.

I wish that there was a marketing crystal ball. I wish that there was something that would tell us from the beginning what people are going to react to. We get lots of good indicators, if you know who your audience is and you know what’s worked before and you have some messages, you’re at a good starting place. Even the best marketer on the planet, Don Draper went with his intuition. It didn’t always work. We as marketers have to test and test and test and iterate and iterate. Measuring is so critical to helping us figure out what’s working and what’s not working.