As a business with a social media presence one of my biggest concerns is defining conversion and being able to track it. Specially because I offer photography services and not products and because I don't have an online shop where you buy my services. My clients have to contact me and together we devise a project. So what should be my conversion and how to know if anyone out there is listening?
The first step in order to know if anyone out there is reacting to your marketing efforts is determining how to track this. The conversion rate is one of those metrics that you define as a business to be able to measure the success of your marketing campaigns and their profitability. You could define it as the number of people who take a desired action that you want for them to take. For instance, you could say that in its basic form it would be converting a person who browses your site into a paying customer. But sometimes you could also want to track other types of conversions that not necessarily end up in a client paying for your services. Like the number of people who opened your marketing email and clicked on a certain link.
The second step is figuring out what is a good conversion rate for your type of business. And I feel like the only way of knowing this is by comparing with other businesses in your sector. The people at Smart Insights posted a very interesting article on email marketing statistics by industry that you should check out.
And lastly, and probably the most difficult step of them all, is deciding what all this means for you. You could have a very good conversion rate but it will only be as good as what you do with this information. Like I said at the beginning of the post, my marketing strategy is not based on a product that I sell, but on a project based service that I offer. My marketing efforts are content based and go into creating brand awareness, audience loyalty and social engagement. For me, a good conversion rate (new subscribers to newsletter, for instance) means nothing on its own if I don't cross-reference it with other metrics (quality of subscribers / leads generated from subscribers).
Like with friends, it's not quantity but quality. No matter how much data you gather or how many metrics you create, it's all worthless if you don't know what to do with them.
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