How to Analyze Current Marketing Campaign Results to See if Your Efforts are Paying Off

It can sometimes feel like an impossible task to determine the ROI of your marketing campaigns. In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges that marketing leaders face. While 66 percent of marketers view analytics as strategically important — according to a January 2017 survey of 217 marketing leaders — only 28 percent are satisfied with their ability to measure performance.

How do you ensure that you’re one of the 28 percent? It all comes down to your marketing department goals. For most companies, there are three things that you have to prove in order to demonstrate that your marketing efforts are paying off.

• How your marketing efforts contribute to revenue.
• How your marketing efforts contribute to sales leads.
• How you marketing efforts match your overall business goals.

The key is to plan and execute your marketing strategy with ROI always at the forefront of every campaign. If you can do this, you’ll be able to safely and efficiently prove your worth a hundred times over. This article will cover the steps you need to take to analyze your marketing results.

Define Your Business Goals & Align Your Efforts to Them

Before setting your marketing goals, you need to know your overall business goals. By knowing these goals, you can more easily determine what marketing efforts you need to implement to reach those goals. How does this help you? 80 percent of CEOs admit they’re not impressed by the work completed by marketers, and more often than not it’s because marketing isn’t aligned with the business.

The goals set forth by your executive team are what your marketing efforts should be based upon. In this way, it’s very easy to ensure that your campaigns impact those goals. For example, if one of your company’s goals is to “sell X services by the end of the first quarter in 2018,” you can then make multiple campaigns around this goal. A few examples include:

• Use paid advertising on social media to sell services. Track the number of conversions generated through social media link clicks. This link walks you through how to set up conversions on Facebook.
• Drive traffic to specific sales landing pages. Using SEO, PPC ads, social media, blogs, email campaigns, and more, how much traffic have you driven to sales landing pages? You can use HubSpot or Google Analytics to determine this number.

In the end, you’ll want to have at least overarching goals and a handful of more specific goals that align your marketing efforts with your business plans.

Determine Your KPIs

The next step to demonstrating the success of your marketing campaigns is to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). Once you have goals, determining your KPIs is a fairly simple step. All you need to remember is that your KPIs will be different for each marketing platform.

For example, if building brand awareness is a goal, one of your specific marketing campaigns to make this happen could be sharing an “About the Company” video. According to HubSpot, adding a video to your marketing emails can increase click-through rates by up to 300%, and in a survey of 200 mobile video viewers, 92 percent said that they share mobile video content with others.

There are a few useful video KPIs metrics you’ll want to track.

• Drop off point: when most viewers stopped watching the video (retention rate)
• Views: how many people clicked on your video to watch it
• Audience growth: have you gained any social media followers or website visitors due to the video?
• Clicks on calls to action: after or while watching the video, how many people clicked on your CTA?

For every marketing campaign, you’ll need to write out your KPIs to track for the duration of the campaign. Then, at the end, you can definitively and easily prove how useful the campaign was in reaching your goals.

Calculate Your Revenue Gained From Marketing

50 percent of B2B marketing executives admit that it’s difficult to attribute marketing activity directly to revenue. This can be a big problem when it comes to proving your value. However, it doesn’t have to be.

There are quite a few methods that you can use to track your marketing revenue ROI, and the most common method is the Single Attribution Model. This model allows you to assign value to your efforts based on whether it was the first touch for the customer or the last touch before making a sale.

For example, let’s say your company held a webinar to bring in new customers. Even if one of those customers didn’t close a deal until a year later, the Single Attribution Model would allow you to give revenue credit to the initial webinar to prove its ROI.

In the same way, you could attribute the revenue to the last touch. In the same example, let’s say that the webinar person only finally closed the deal after a year because they watch your new product demo video. In this case, the product demo video would get the revenue attribution and proof of your success.

Other ways to track revenue to your marketing efforts include simple calculations to determine your revenue versus your cost per lead. You can also track direct conversions using Google Analytics, or if you use HubSpot, this is calculated for you.

In the end, tracking the ROI of your marketing efforts is a big job, an even bigger job if you have a small marketing team. But it doesn’t have to be impossible. Instead, as long as you have a plan from the beginning that tracks to your company goals and ultimately your company’s bottom line, then you can show what your efforts are worth.

If you determine your campaign results are less than optimal, check out our ebook for tips on running great marketing campaigns.

Originally published at blog.undergroundcreativegroup.com.