Many business owners question the value of marketing. Is it really worth dedicating a significant chunk of your business budget to marketing campaigns? When executed well, then yes. You should expect your return from marketing to be 3-5 times more than your spend. It is unlikely this will be the case in the initial stages of delivering your marketing campaigns so don’t expect instantaneous results. Set a timescale of when you want to be seeing real results. If you’re not achieving what you predicted, why not? Always assess your success and measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.
So, how can you start measuring the effectiveness of marketing?
Step 1: Set the objectives for marketing campaigns
What is it you are trying to achieve? When do you want to achieve this, and how does this objective contribute towards the overall goals of the business? This should be the basis of your marketing plan and campaigns , if you need some advice on writing an effective marketing plan, check out our previous blog post.
Step 2: How will it be measured?
What does success look like, and what tools are we going to use to track whether it has been successful? This could be financial metrics, however dependent on the overall goals, there may be other factors.
Step 3: Test
If we’re trialling a campaign, then let’s make sure it’s going to work before we roll it out to all our potential customers. With email marketing campaigns, that could be testing subject lines and layouts with a small group to ensure that we get as many ‘clicks’ as possible, or with advertising we can test offers in smaller magazines or websites for short periods before rolling out a more complete campaign. It’s a basic concept – but fail small!
Step 4: Do it
Make the investment, and create the marketing campaigns.
Step 5: Measure!
Did it work? Did you achieve your goals?
Step 6: Refine, review and do it again.
Now that you’ve measured the performance against your goals, you can decide on what you need to change or add, in order to make it a success, or if it’s working well – do it again.
What measurements can you use for marketing campaigns?
Tip 1: Get more from your website analytics
The majority of businesses use Google Analytics to simply measure website visits, bounce rates and most visited pages. Not enough businesses are using Google Analytics to its full potential. Analytics provides so many useful features that enable you to understand how your members are using your website. It can also tell you what terms and keywords people are using to find your website. Here’s a few things you can start doing to help you get more from Analytics:
1. Measure conversions with goals
In order to get the most out of Google Analytics, you need to define and set goals, just as you would for your acquisition and retention goals. Setting up conversions will confirm that you are on track to reach your business objectives. Your conversion rate is the most important KPI, regardless of the objective and the purpose of your website. A conversion could be a download or sign up on the website. This allows the measurement of the overall performance of digital marketing campaigns in regard to goals that have a bigger impact.
2. Create custom dashboards
Google Analytics allows you to create custom dashboards so you can quickly access the most valuable data. You should spend time creating a dashboard or two that focus on your main KPIs such as sign-ups for event, forms completed etc. Google Analytics also offers a Solutions Gallery of ready-to-use dashboard templates that have been submitted by other users. Some of these dashboard templates are very effective. Google Analytics also allows you to create custom reports, which is a great way to create a report specifically designed for your needs.
Need help setting up Google analytics? You can find out more about our digital marketing service here.
Tip 2 – Email marketing analytics are still important
Email marketing is still a great way to measure and monitor performance of marketing campaigns and engagement from your customers. Again, the metrics should all be based around what you want to achieve. Do you just want people opening your email? Or do you want to drive them to a specific page, buy a product, sign up to an event, donate to a cause or vote on an issue?
Once you define what you want the email to achieve, you can establish what statistics are worth paying attention to. High open rates don’t really give you any valuable data. Creating conversions will help you understand the performance of the email. If you can track that a member was sent that email and subsequently signed up to that event or whatever your goal is, then that is the statistic that really matters.
Tip 3 – Put measurements in place for print
When it comes to a printed magazine. Here are some useful techniques on how you can measure your print campaigns to maximise your understanding of their success:
QR codes
These make it easy for readers to quickly scan a graphic in the magazine and automate an action such as opening a link, making a call, sending an email or visiting a social media account, for example.
Special offer vouchers
Using a magazine or brochure to a captive audience is the perfect opportunity to give your customers a voucher or offer code. The redemption of vouchers is a great way to monitor how many people are actually reading and engaging with your magazine.
In any other investment situation, we evaluate the success or failure of that investment on the return, which is why it should be no different from marketing investment. You need to put the right measurements in place for you to understand your return on investment.
