Why Campaign Monitoring Is Essential for Marketing Success

In today's fast-paced and competitive business landscape, marketing is one of the tools that businesses can use to survive and even thrive.

But if you’re to make use of this tool, one thing to learn early on is that marketing campaigns aren’t generally set-and-forget. Most marketing campaigns have to be monitored.

This is critical when trying to drive the results you want. By closely tracking your campaigns, you’re more likely to make intelligent and data-driven decisions that lead to your actual goals.

Read on to learn more about why you need to act as a campaign monitor for every one of your marketing strategies. We’ll show you the main benefits of doing this as well as how to make the most of them.

What are the benefits of monitoring marketing campaigns?

There are many advantages to campaign monitoring, but below are the ones that we think most valuable.

1. Enables performance evaluation

Monitoring your marketing campaign allows you to assess its efficacy accurately. What does this mean? Simply put, it tells you if the campaign is getting you closer to your goals.

Of course, this presumes you’re using appropriate digital marketing campaign metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators). That means the metrics you’re measuring should actually be related to your aims.

As a simplified example, let’s say you start a campaign with the goal of getting more brand awareness for a business selling chocolates.

An example of a metric that could make sense here would be the number of social media mentions the brand gets during and after the campaign. More mentions may indicate higher awareness among consumers for the brand, after all.

You should always match the metrics to measure marketing campaigns to your goals. This lets you see if your campaign is working as desired or not, which means you can adjust or even cut it short accordingly.

2. Provides real-time insights

Getting real-time insight into your campaign’s performance can do a lot for you. Among other things, it means you can see trends and seize opportunities before they pass!

This is especially important when you consider how quickly the market or audience interests can change. An amazing chance to give your brand an edge or give it massive exposure can be there and gone in a flash.

And if you happen to be a smaller business or a marketer operating on a smaller budget than most, these insights are even more valuable. Sometimes, timeliness is all you need to defeat competition with much bigger marketing budgets.

3. Allow for budget optimisation

Monitoring your campaigns is one of the best ways to ensure you don’t waste your money on something that’s not working.

By tracking metrics such as CPC (cost per click) or ROI (return on investment), for instance, you can easily figure out if what you’re paying is worth what it’s giving you back – or if it’s giving you something back at all!

And if you have multiple campaigns, you can also figure out your budget split more intelligently. That can mean either allocating more of your resources to the better-performing campaign or giving the weaker campaign a fresh infusion of resources to see if it improves.

4. Better targeting and personalisation

Easily one of the most valuable benefits of campaign monitoring is that it gives you opportunities to better understand your target audience.

This is because it lets you hone in on data points like these:

What your customers prefer
How your customers behave
What your customer demographics are
What messaging your customers respond to most
How your audience segments differ from each other

All of this lets you double down on one of the most effective marketing strategies of today: personalisation! You can personalise or target your campaigns to better connect with your intended audience and achieve your goals.

What are simple steps to start campaign tracking?

So, now that you know why campaign monitoring is worthwhile, how can you begin reaping its benefits for yourself? Here are some simple steps to get you started!

Set clear objectives	Identify what your actual goals and objectives are first. What do you hope to do? What do you want to achieve? How do these align with your overall business aims and how do they benefit your business? These are the questions to ask.
Track relevant metrics	Now that you know what your goals are, you can identify the metrics you need to track. What KPIs are relevant to the goal of each campaign? Should you look at conversion rate, cost per purchase, website visits, social media follows, and so on? Figure out what matches your concerns and keep an eye on those metrics.
Use analytics tools	There are various analytics tools available nowadays, often even built into the platforms we use. Google has analytics tools, as do most social media platforms. All of these can be set to monitor various metrics on your campaigns, from click-through rates to the sources of your traffic.
Schedule regular review sessions	Regular reviews can help you make better use of the data from your monitoring. If you review the data at least once a week, for example, you’re more likely to spot patterns and trends faster – or in time to take advantage of them. This also lets you adjust for optimisation or to fix underperforming campaigns quicker.

Set up your own campaign monitoring today

Campaign monitoring is clearly a requirement for any savvy marketer who wants to make data-driven decisions. Among other things, it also encourages the development of a mindset geared towards continuous improvement.

After all, it enables you to iterate and tweak campaigns based on results, learning from both successes and failures until you identify what gets you the most effective results.

If you want to learn more about how to do this for your own marketing, talk to us. Campaign monitoring is a crucial part of our workflow and we’ve used it to benefit many clients over the years.