How to Evaluate Your Marketing Campaign

Marketing is always changing because people and their interests are always changing. More importantly, the way people interact is — guess what — changing.

The unpredictable development of technology is harder to keep up with than in recent years. I’m not going to tell you to keep on keeping up, but you should be as flexible as possible. It’s not about what you know, but how you grow.

Cute, right?

Now, before we look at how to evaluate your marketing campaigns, we’ll first have to understand exactly what that involves. Evaluating means looking at the end result, at least, at the end result of your plan before you begin executing your promotion.

It’s not enough to have a plan that you believe in. You need to understand the factors that will make your promotion successful or not.

It may be old-school to believe you can just market well without looking at the stats. You can guess, rely on a magic 8 ball, or you can read this guide. I guess since you’re reading this, you’ve seen “ask again later” one too many times.

Planning

It’s all in the plan. Aside from understanding what to measure, you need to secure a plan. This is really what you’ll be evaluating, whereas your overall campaign will be consistently assessed throughout its duration.

We’d all love if consumers were instantly attracted to our businesses, but most people won’t give an email the time of day. Especially if you haven’t already established a relationship. *Marks as spam. Deletes.

Boost Recognition

For this reason, your first goal in planning your marketing campaign is to boost recognition. Asserting yourself in the market and maintaining a good reputation are challenging. Brand awareness and recognition can be developed using an already established reputation. Who do you think are the best people to promote your business? Most likely, customers with experience with you.

Develop a referral program to encourage your loyal customers to spread the word for an included benefit.

Have contests on your social media sites. This gives people a motivation to get involved and spread your name.

Get connected with other local businesses to share the wealth and spread the word. You scratch a back, you might just get a scratch back.

Once your name is out there, you’ll be able to reach a larger base much more easily. This can ensure your marketing campaign has some structure.

Lead Generation

Once you’ve screamed your brand’s name from the tops of every building, you can start to organize a more developed and specific campaign. That’s right, my friends, all of this was just to prime your market as a form of lead generation.

Before execution, you need to sharpen the blade. Dark? Yes. Too much Game of Thrones.

Lead generation is a way of getting into contact with potential clients. For example, by having consumers enter a contest hosted by your company, they’ll have to supply you with information which you can use for future contact.

In terms of a referral program, the client will come to you. Your lead is, therefore, your already established business with pre-existing clients or your connections within the community.

You should make sure your lead generation isn’t crossing the very fine line between spamming and promoting. More cowbell. Less email harassment.

Now that your plan is about to ship out, consider this: does your online marketing all directly lead the user back to a sale using a call to action? Are all your channels (social media, app, website, payments etc.) connected?

Time to move on to more specific ways of evaluating your marketing campaign.

Marketing Metrics

If you’re new to inbound marketing, which includes direct interactions, whether through email campaigns, website visits, in-person interactions, or social media access, you’ll want to look at some key factors to understand whether your campaign is getting the intended results.

First, you’ll need to set goals. Next, you’ll need to monitor your progress, and finally you’ll have to compare. Although you can and should compare your goals against the progress you achieve regularly, it’s very hard to determine much over a short term.

Your marketing metrics are your best way to measure your marketing goals. KPI (key performance indicator) metrics give you the focus that you need for tracking success. What you need to understand is your purchase funnel. Some key metrics to look at include:

Conversion rate tells you at what rate consumers are transitioned to customers, travelling through rings of the purchase funnel. Imagine rings in a funnel to be awareness, interest, consideration, and preference. Each ring is a checkpoint, and the finish line is a purchase and hopefully customer loyalty.

ROI (return on investment) includes customer acquisition cost (CAC) which weighs the cost of obtaining a new customer and incremental sales which demonstrate the connection between your sales increases and your campaigns.

Customer retention (including returning visitors) is easy to notice, especially if you look at your customer attrition.

Click-through rate is probably already on your radar if you’re posting web content. If not, it’s a highly valuable way to monitor the effectiveness of your posts and content and can tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong or right in terms of SEO (i.e. keywords).

Social media and social channel metrics are easy to access and usually free. Facebook and Twitter not only allow you to observe your metrics, but they also send reminders, notifications of influxes and decreases, and tips on how and when to boost posts. You’re able to web traffic sources, new visits, and consumer engagement while on your site.

You’ll need an array of software to help get all the data you need. Explore tracking tools like Google Analytics, which is free and can help organize and view your selected metrics of focus. Klout can help you track your effects on social media. There are many resources for SEO to help you track and rank trending keywords, but most require a bit of a fee.

Improve Your Future Campaigns

It’s one thing to say “hey, focus on this data in your marketing because…” and another to actually use it. The main question to ask when identifying and understanding these metrics is whether you can act on them. What can you develop on and what can you avoid in the future.

Since you’ve set the goals, you’re the best fit for understanding and evaluating your collected metrics. You should rate your campaign’s progress in comparison to these goals. Are you where you want to be?

If you have the budget, and you’re unsure what, amongst your options will work best, you can monitor the progress of one campaign by implementing multiple around the same time. This can be pricey (and is not for the faint-hearted). It assumes that (at least) one campaign will work worse than the others. This means loss upon initial loss, weighed against possible gain. Fingers crossed? Maybe not.

There are many resources for forecasting your campaign’s performance. Use your annual sales, your performance metrics, and monitor like Big Brother.

After all is said and done, your progress will show in more than numbers. Follow up with surveys and invitations to leave feedback so you can perfect more than just your marketing campaigns.