A lot of time and effort is spent on creating marketing campaigns. You need to plan your strategy, do the necessary preparations, use the right tools, and execute your plan. And, it doesn’t just stop there. Marketing is an ongoing process, so you’ll have to create and execute numerous campaigns over time.
With all the efforts and resources poured into your marketing campaigns to ensure success, nothing’s more disappointing than not being able to make sense of your results or finding out that they failed to bring you any closer to your business goals. To avoid this disappointment, you need to start measuring your marketing performance. This article shares tips and strategies on how to do just that.
Always Set Goals
Before you can track and measure your marketing performance, you need to establish your goals. This way, you can properly measure your progress and help you understand whether or not you’ve reached your desired results. It also helps you identify areas for improvement in the long term.
Don’t make general or vague goals. Instead, you need to create goals with these five characteristics:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
So, instead of ‘increasing traffic’ as your goal, a SMART goal would be something like ‘double website traffic in the next three months using SEO.’ Depending on your business and the type of marketing you use, you might want to set different SMART goals.
Choose Your Marketing Metrics
There are numerous key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use for your marketing performance analysis. However, the right key marketing KPIs can help you quantify the progress of your set goals.
That said, the most commonly tracked and measured KPIs include:
- Cost Per Lead
This metric measures the cost-effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in producing new sales leads. To calculate this metric, you need to factor in the cost of marketing, software and tools, and other elements that contribute to generating a lead.
- Return On Investment (ROI)
Your marketing ROI allows you to calculate how much revenue is being generated by a particular marketing campaign as compared to the costs of running it. This is considered the most important KPI you need to monitor and assess since it reveals if your campaign was rewarding and by how much.
- Customer Lifetime Value
This KPI tells you how much revenue you can expect over the average lifespan of a customer. In short, it shows you how much a customer is worth to your business. This KPI is especially important since acquiring new customers costs money. If you can generate revenue from existing customers, your CPL should drop and your marketing budget can be spent on loyal and better quality prospects.
- Customer Acquisition Cost
This metric helps measure the amount of money you spend to convert a potential lead into a customer. It helps businesses in deciding how much money they can spend on attracting customers.
- Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of web visitors who completed a desired action, which could be anything from simply signing up for a newsletter to purchasing a product. This KPI can help you understand how successful your strategies are at attracting leads.
Leverage The Right Tools
One of the greatest benefits of digital marketing is that it’s easier to measure than traditional advertising. Traditional advertising methods, such as flyers or magazine ads, are difficult to track. You don’t know who saw your ad and whether it contributed to your goals. Unless you ask every customer coming into your store, you’ll never know if your marketing methods are really working.
With digital marketing, you can use advanced and automated tools to gain easy access to detailed and accurate data on how your campaigns perform. And, you have a lot of options, from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to third party marketing analytics tools.
In addition, the marketing software and tools you’re currently using probably already have an analytics feature that allows you to track and measure your marketing efforts.
That said, if you’re using different tools for different teams to track your marketing campaign, you need to consolidate your marketing data into a single place. It’s important to remove the silos between departments to help improve data accuracy and provide you with a holistic view of your marketing performance.
Takeaway
Measuring marketing performance isn’t easy. However, without an objective measurement of your marketing performance, you don’t know what’s working and what’s not.
Mastering your analytics has never been more important than today. It’s evolved from simply providing you with a better understanding of your marketing results into an effective tool that shapes your marketing strategy and impacts your business’s bottom line.
