Much like in product development, hiring new staff, and every other strategy to grow your business, marketing campaigns consume company resources.
Whether outsourcing to an ads agency or doing the work in-house, they incur significant cost, time, and effort to execute.
With these at stake, it’s only fitting to demand results. Launching one campaign after the other is a waste without knowing if they’re funneling brand awareness, sales, and conversions to your business. Without quantifiable outcomes, it’s impossible to pinpoint lapses and areas of improvement.
Here’s how you can measure the success of your marketing campaigns:
1. Set Clear, SMART Objectives
Without goal setting, how will you visualize your end goal? What should you measure up to? How will you determine your win? Every initiative starts with a plan. Your promotional efforts are no different.
Reports show that goal-setting marketers are 377% more successful than their peers. This is because objectives are the foundation of your marketing plan. They dictate every aspect of your campaigns, including your strategy, your targets, the basis of your success, and how you’ll track your progress.
Remember to structure specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals as a rule of thumb. Here are some objective examples following the SMART goal-setting guide:
- Increase engagements from 10% to 11% by uploading fun and trendy reels and images monthly.
- Funnel a 10% lead to conversion increase rate of new products by publishing ten high-quality, helpful content in the next five months.
- Boost upsell bookings by 5% in the 3rd and 4th quarters through targeted email marketing campaigns.
2. Determine Key Performance Metrics
Measuring requires the use of scales. Marketers consider several scales to evaluate a campaign’s weight or effectiveness in driving sales and engagement to their business.
These so-called weighing scales are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Once you’ve nailed your goals, choosing the right metrics to oversee your campaigns should be your next step. 95% of leading marketers say your KPI must correspond to your broader business goals.
Each KPI reflects a customer’s stage in the buyer’s journey. Here’s a guide to help you:
Awareness
- Organic traffic
- Impressions
- Reach
- Cost per 1,000 impressions
- Average time on page
- Followers and subscribers
- Social engagement (likes, comments, shares, etc.)
- Email/newsletter engagement (open rates, clicks, etc.)
Consideration
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
- Clicks
- Unqualified leads
- Site traffic
- Time on site
- Pages per visit
- Return rate
- Lead gen rate
- Bounce rate
- Downloads (guides, checklists, surveys, etc.)
Decision
- Sales
- Upgrades and upsells
- Cost-per-conversion
- Conversion rate
- Qualified leads
- Renewals
- Customer satisfaction
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Referrals
- Customer reviews and testimonials
3. Use the Right Tools
Businesses nowadays use many digital tools to streamline their processes and automate most of their admin work. Setting up an ecommerce website, integrating shipping software programs, and so on are crucial to their online operations. Digital tools are even more necessary in online marketing.
Measuring campaign effectiveness is the core of every marketing team. Much of their role is monitoring their marketing assets in real-time and generating data to help them understand their performance.
All of these are virtually only possible by investing in marketing tools. These are platforms like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and built-in social media management like Facebooks Ads.
The right tool is a marketer’s ally in tracking campaigns, understanding their audience’s behavior in-depth, and generating accurate reports to pursue crucial and data-driven initiatives.
4. Compare and Refine
An all-increase result in engagements may appear as a win. But how does it compare to your previous performances? Is the audience reception worse or better this time than before?
Your previous campaign results contain valuable data for calibrating your growth. They can serve as benchmarks in determining your current strengths, gaps, and opportunities that you can capitalize on for improvement. You can bank on what works, abandon or enhance the missing parts, and leverage promising prospects and trends to elevate your future campaigns.
Aim for Marketing Success
Marketing is more than just getting your brand out there. Every ad placement, promo, seasonal offer, and other initiative brings you the closest to your audience. If you’re not consistently and strategically boosting your online presence, you’re already out of your target audience’s radar.
Quantifying your engagements, clicks, conversions, and other performance metrics gives a definite picture of your progress. The reports also provide valuable insights into planning better and more effective campaigns. Please look at the tips above for easy, practical ways to measure your advertising success.
