Measurement is the key to optimising any process. That includes marketing campaigns.
By establishing and measuring KPI (key performance indicators), you’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t.
This means you’ll be able to spend wisely too, investing in only digital marketing tools that serve your purposes and directing your budget to the most effective campaigns.
Because campaign measurement is so important to marketing success, we’ll take you through what you need to know about it in this primer. Let’s start by talking about objectives.
Step 1: Set your goals
To measure the success of anything, you first have to figure out what success looks like. That’s why we have to set the goals of a campaign.
Now, we’ve talked a bit about this before in our guide to the first stage of The Marketing Flow. Goals are the things you want to achieve in your campaign.
Marketing goals are related to things like the strategy a company chooses, its market situation, the seasonal customer activities, and the product cycle stage. Here are some common goals:
1. Build brand reputation
Whether you want to establish your brand as an environmentally friendly one or the one with the best customer service on the market, it falls under this goal.
2. Increase brand presence
This is usually related to gaining higher visibility.
3. Optimise brand positioning
This is when you want to ensure that your brand is top-of-mind for consumers when certain services (such as those you offer) are called for.
4. Increase traffic
This often means you want more people visiting your website or assets like your blog.
5. Get more prospects/customers from existing market
About as simple as it gets: you want more potential clients coming to your company to add to the ones you already have.
6. Launch a new product or service
You need to make sure the new product or service you’re offering makes enough of a splash to get people interested in it.
7. Break into new markets
A lot of people start campaigns for this reason: because they realise that they have opportunities in markets they previously left untapped.
8. Retain existing customers
Building brand loyalty and ensuring current clients don’t switch to a competitor is a fairly common campaign goal. Many companies spend a lot on customer retention.
9. Increase sales
This can often be linked to the goal of getting more prospects. It just means bringing up conversions, as they’re often called in marketing.
10. Increase customer advocacy
This typically refers to the attempt to get loyal customers to advocate or even promote the brand.
A Note on Setting Optimal Goals
All of the examples we gave above are valid goals. The only poor goal is the one that doesn’t serve your business.
Take note, however, that some goals serve your business far better than others. It’s important to look at the bigger picture when selecting campaign goals – particularly when you’re on a limited marketing budget.
For example, many marketers fall into the trap of assuming that digital marketing success is in simply getting a lead or customer at a cheaper cost than before.
That may make sense at first, sure. But it may also dupe you into prioritising short-term gains over long-term ones.
Let’s say you set up a marketing campaign for sales and it’s successful. Then let’s say your competitor does a campaign instead that brings in fewer sales but builds bigger brand awareness.
At first sight, it may appear as though your campaign is more successful than your competitor’s.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t contribute to your brand’s longevity or customer retention. And with brand awareness often leading to more repeat customers, your competitor may well get more sales in the long run.
Step 2: Choose your metrics
Now it’s time to choose your objectives or metrics, i.e. the actual measurable indicators you can use to check if your campaign is achieving its goals.
Measuring digital marketing campaign effectiveness is one of the key tasks for a marketing department. The metrics involved vary by campaign and goal, obviously, but here are common ones:
1. Total visits to website
This is usually measured per unique visitor coming to the website.
2. Click-through rate
Also called CTR, this refers to the percentage of people viewing a call-to-action from your campaign who end up clicking on it or following through on the call to action.
3. New prospects/customers gained
This is typically counted in terms of new clients coming in to purchase or convert following or during a campaign.
4. Website traffic to lead/purchase ratio
This ratio simply gives you an idea of how many visitors to your site it takes before you get an actual click or conversion.
As for how often you should take measurements, it really depends on your business and campaign. Your timeframe, goals, and objectives themselves play a part here.
If a metric is likely to see movement in the needle quickly, it makes sense to check it more often. Examples of such metrics are site visits and leads, which many marketers check daily.
CTR (click-through rate) and blog views move quickly too, but slightly less so, so most marketers check them weekly.
Finally, things like search engine results ranking generally move slowly, so most marketers will only check them monthly.
Metrics for Content Marketing
If what you’re trying to track is your content marketing, by the way, you should be looking at things like engagement metrics on social media platforms. You may also want to look at website and page performance in the case of blogs.
Here are more examples:
1. Reach
This refers to how many people have seen a post since you published it. People often get the post reach percentage by dividing reach by total number of followers and multiplying the figure by 100.
2. Brand mentions
Fairly straightforward, this refers to how many times people mention your brand on social media in a reporting period.
3. Number of likes and/or shares
These are the classic engagement metrics. Marketers often measure this to get an idea of what posts and topics their audience finds valuable or appealing.
4. Brand name search
This just means how many people are looking for the brand online, whether on social media or Google.
5. Average time on page
This can help you figure out which of your content seems to hold people’s attention longer and which doesn’t.
Step 3: Analyse the data
Once you actually have data for your campaign, you can use it to improve what you’re doing. That’s why data analysis and campaign optimisation is a key part of the process.
Let’s take a hypothetical example. Let’s say you may have achieved a high click-through rate and positive responses to a lead-generation campaign using ads.
Yet you find that the actual conversion rate is low. In other words, most of the people clicking on your ad aren’t actually buying what you’re offering.
That may tell you several things. For example, the landing page or product description may not be meeting people’s expectations, which is a possibility since response to an offer is also tied to product characteristics.
In that case, you can try testing a change to see if it improves conversion rate. Change the CTA or the product description.
You can then compare and contrast the results with the previous campaign’s metrics.
This is why metrics are integral to any marketing strategy. By offering insight into what works and what doesn’t, they help you aim for optimal campaigns each time.
Get started on your own marketing campaign now
As you can see, metrics are critical for marketers. But beyond them, the success of your campaign depends on a variety of other factors.
That includes the platforms, instruments, target audience, creatives for your ads, etc. There’s so much that goes into a masterful marketing campaign!
If you need help with this or any other aspect of your marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’ll be happy to offer advice on what you may need for your business to flourish, so contact us for your digital marketing needs!
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