🚀 How to know if marketing is working?

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3 tactics to know if marketing is working

⚒️ Build a simple tracking foundation

• Track where each lead came from (e.g. organic search, paid ads, newsletters, referrals, events, or other channels)

• Audit tracking regularly because UTMs break, forms get misconfigured, and leads often end up as “unknown source”

• Measure pipeline and revenue impact, not just traffic or lead volume 

  • Track demo requests, trial signups, opportunities, and closed deals instead of page views or time on site

  • A blog with 200 visits matters less than one that contributes to a closed deal

• Add a CRM field or use call recording tools to capture sales feedback and identify which content customers mention during deals and what influences their decisions

  • Eg. “prospect referenced the pricing guide” or “customer found us through a case study”

📊 Monitor market signals

• Most marketing influences buyers rather than acquiring them directly; look for signals that show growing awareness and influence over time

• Monitor organic branded search volume: more people searching for the company name usually indicates stronger market presence

• Track LLM visibility: Test buyer questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to see if the brand appears and how it is described

• Measure trends monthly instead of chasing daily changes; look for consistent growth in awareness, visibility, and consideration

• Compare performance against competitors to understand whether the brand is becoming part of customer shortlists

👀 Capture how customers discovered the brand

• Some of the most valuable marketing insights come directly from customers, not analytics dashboards

  • Add a simple “How did you hear about us?” question on demo forms

  • Review responses monthly to identify repeated patterns (Eg. podcast mentions, conference conversations, peer recommendations, comparison articles)

  • Use customer feedback to uncover hidden channels that attribution tools miss

• Avoid optimizing only for measurable clicks: Clean dashboards do not always mean better marketing results; focus on insights that improve decisions and revenue impact

2 traps to avoid

🚨 Demanding perfect attribution before making marketing decisions

• Cutting anything that isn't directly measurable biases investment toward easy-to-track channels, not highest-impact channels

• Brand, content, and word-of-mouth often influence deals long before conversion

• Evaluate marketing using multiple signals like pipeline, branded search, inbound quality, deal velocity, and customer feedback

🚨 Tracking metrics that don’t drive decisions

• Every metric should answer one question: what decision changes because of this number?

• If a metric doesn't lead to action, stop tracking it

• Focus on metrics that improve strategy, budget allocation, and execution, not reporting

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on tracking marketing effectiveness

• B2B buyers spend 83% of their total buying time doing independent research, internal discussions, and conversations across channels that leave no trace in CRMs: forwarded PDFs, peer recommendations, Slack threads, Reddit threads, G2 reviews, and, increasingly, AI search

• Use a basic marketing stack:

  • Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console

  • Bing Webmaster Tools to monitor pages cited by AI search and assistants

  • HubSpot (or another CRM + marketing automation platform)

  • Google Tag Manager to simplify future tracking and pixel setup

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