It goes without saying that marketing is one of the biggest and most important expenses a business will make. After all, if you don’t do the right things to add your customer base, your business isn’t going to grow in both size and revenue. This is why effective marketing campaigns are essential to the continued success of any business.
The problem is, most businesses don’t have an unlimited marketing budget. This results in the need for every business to examine the effectiveness of each marketing campaign to see if this type of campaign was successful or should be avoided in the future. Let’s explore this topic a little further and see how your business can track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
How to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
There are several steps you can take to track the results of any marketing campaign. Here is an example of how most businesses are doing it these days.
- 1. Plan the campaign and how you want to follow it
This step is pretty self-explanatory. As with anything you do that relates to your business or even your life for that matter, it should start with a well thought out and effective plan. Once the marketing campaign is planned, you then need to decide what methods you want to use to track its effectiveness.
- Set the channels you want to follow
To measure the success of your advertising campaign, it’s easiest to do when you divide your marketing derivative traffic into subgroups which are more commonly referred to as channels. Here are some of the most common types of channels and what they involve.
- Direct – These are potential customers who find your business directly without being directed to it by other parties. An example of this is someone who saw your web address on a printout and typed it into their web browser to get information about your product or service.
- Referral – These are potential customers who find their way to your site through a third party who hasn’t used a social media site or search engine to reach you. Maybe your business will give the third party something like a referral bonus for it or you have a mutual agreement to have links to each other’s sites on your individual websites.
- Organic – These are the people who find your business through a search engine such as Google. They were usually looking for a type of product or service that your business offers, but they weren’t specifically looking for your business. Many times a UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameter is configured to help find you.
- Email – These leads are people who have come to you through things such as an email campaign that you have started. Many reach you using a “utm_medium” containing the words email or e-mail.
- Paid – These are potential customers who have come to you as a result of a paid advertising campaign, such as a print ad in a newspaper or an ad on a web content site.
- Social Networks – These are people who have found you while surfing social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. There are hundreds of websites that fall into this category.
- None – This is a catch-all category (it doesn’t necessarily have to be called “none”) into which all people who find you through channels other than those mentioned above are placed.
- Define the marketing metrics you want to measure
Like any responsible business, you’ll want to measure the return on investment you get from your marketing campaigns, and one of the best ways to do that is through marketing metrics. Marketing metrics are simply a collection of digital data that allow you to gain perspective on a marketing campaign to see if it has achieved the goals your business has set for itself.
You can generate data in several different ways to form a specific metric. Here are some ways it can be done:
- Web Content – This is the study of the effectiveness of what you place on your website both in informing people who visit the site and in getting them to take action accordingly; it shows that the quality of the content was actually good enough that these people followed all the way to the achievable task you set.
- Lead Conversion – This is about collecting data about people when they first come into contact with your marketing strategy, and then tracking them through the various stages of the lead generation process. This includes the initial contact, then from being a sales prospect to becoming a real customer. This metric will track where you lost leads in the lead process and help you develop theories as to why.
- Individual Visitors – This is data that tracks when an individual user first visits your website in a given period of time and how many times that same person has returned to visit it again. This metric allows you to see the effectiveness of each phase of a specific marketing plan.
- Measure your campaigns
Once you’ve planned how you’re going to track and measure your marketing campaign, as well as set the parameters for it, it’s time for the actual tracking to take place once your campaign goes into effect.
- Measuring Your “Search” Marketing Performance – Google Analytics is very necessary for measuring traffic and other traffic related data to your website, but it’s not enough anymore. Here are some other elements relating to the search functions which are very relevant to the marketing strategy.
- Measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing – All major social media sites have built-in analytics that help you track the effectiveness of your posts and other messages you put there.
- Measure Print Ads and Other Media – This is done by creating a dedicated webpage on your site that can only be linked so that you know what the source of those links is. Setting up tracking URLs is also a good way to do this type of thing.
