Most small businesses spend most of their time focusing on the day to day operations, and find it hard to carve out time to focus on marketing and growing their business. It’s even harder to find time to learn the various facets of digital marketing and understand what are the fundamental basics of digital marketing that should be done first.
Many people in small businesses are running some kind of social media activity, and are usually allocating precious marketing budget to boost their posts or run ads. However it can be hard to work out if paid social media activity delivers a return on investment. Most people I’ve spoken with could significantly improve their digital marketing effectiveness by taking 3 simple steps:
1. Set up a conversion goal in your online analytics platform (e.g. Google analytics) which fires when someone makes a booking or buys something on your website.
2. Use UTM parameters on links to your website from boosted social posts and ads. This gives you a unique URL called a ‘Campaign URL’ and lets you distinguish your own social activity from general social media referral traffic in your analytics reports. Google has a useful tool for creating campaign URLs which is really easy to use. You simply enter the destination URL (i.e. the page you want to send people to), the campaign source (the specific place where you will be showing the link, such as Facebook), and the campaign medium (the category of place you’re showing it (people commonly use social, display, email or any other medium here).
After entering the info into the fields, the tool will generate a campaign URL which you can then copy and use as the destination URL in your social media posts and ads.
For more detailed information on UTMs, read our guide here.
3. Look at the source & medium section in your analytics platform to work out the cost per visit and cost per conversion of your digital marketing activity.
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