The digital realm dominates the field of marketing, with experts predicting that digital spending will top $626.86 billion in 2023. Based on this, there’s no doubt that online marketing is the most popular way to advertise your brand, goods, and services, but is it worth it?
Marketing is never simply an assortment of hit-or-miss attempts to grab attention online.
If you want to maximize your online efforts, implementing a structured digital marketing strategy is the best way to succeed. How do you know when you’re winning at marketing, though, or when to change your tactics?
Keep reading to discover how to measure marketing campaign effectiveness like a pro and enjoy the real benefits of digital marketing.
Steps for Measuring Your Marketing Success
Ideally, every marketing campaign should take you a little closer to your goals. Your business has more than enough data available to help you figure this out.
Here’s how to set up a system that makes your data work for you:
1. Establish Goals
You need to identify specific goals to track your marketing campaign’s performance. Vague criteria like ‘get more sales’ won’t give you useful information.
It’s best to use formal goal-setting tactics, like:
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
OKRs refer to clear goals and intentions (objectives) combined with time-bound, measurable milestones (key results). These focus on what your goals are and how to reach them.
SMART Goals
SMART stands for “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound”. The main focus here is on clearly defining your goals.
2. Create Key Performance Indicators
KPIs help you quantify your marketing efforts using quantifiable metrics. For instance, brand retention is impossible to quantify without extensive research, but you can count how many people visit your website in a day.
Setting up KPIs helps you compare apples to apples when it comes to marketing spend versus your desired goals. If you hope to achieve one sale every month for every $100 spent, KPI metrics help you monitor whether you’ve reached your target.
Two Golden Rules of KPIs
You must be measuring aspects that are relevant to your business’s success. To make sure you’re on the right track, these are the basic rules to keep in mind when setting KPIs:
- Avoid vanity metrics such as likes and shares on social media
- Track KPIs at each stage of the buyer journey
3. Define a Time Frame
Every campaign needs a beginning and an endpoint for tracking data. This could be days, weeks, or months.
The longer the time frame you choose, the more opportunities you’ll have to refine your campaign to meet your goals.
4. Set Up a Measurement Schedule
A measurement schedule helps you detect changes over time. It’s too late to change tack at the end of your campaign.
Keeping track along the way and making appropriate adjustments helps you get a better outcome.
5. Pick the Right Tools
There are many highly effective free tools available to marketers. For instance, if you’re running a social media campaign, consider using data from analytics tools provided by each platform.
Google Analytics is another highly useful tool you can use to track your website’s traffic. If you want to create free tracking links, you can use a dedicated URL for each marketing campaign using the Google Campaign URL Builder or Linkly.
Call tracking is a good way to monitor any business coming in via calls to order goods or book appointments. With this software, you can quantify relevant phone calls in a way that makes sense for your KPIs.
When you work with an online marketing bureau, they will have specialized tools for monitoring, testing, and analyzing your efforts. Based on this data, you can adjust your campaigns as necessary to ensure maximum reach and results.
6. Create Benchmarks
Create benchmarks for every stage of your campaign. These help you keep track of your progress throughout and adjust your tactics to achieve the best outcomes.
7. Record Your Progress
It’s important to keep track of the data you collect. All the information you gather along the way is important for streamlining future campaigns.
Creating a marketing dashboard for all this data and your relevant findings is a good way to share this information with relevant stakeholders, too.
How to Measure Marketing Campaign Effectiveness Using KPIs
KPIs are useful for measuring your performance against your goals. These are some good examples of key performance indicators:
ROI (Return on Investment)
ROI simply means how much you earn compared to how much you spend to earn it. For instance, if you spend $3,000 on a social media campaign and it generates $10,000 in sales, that means your ROI is $7,000, or 233%.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is a similar concept, except it only considers your advertising costs. ROI should include all marketing costs, like agency or employee costs for putting your campaign together.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate refers to how many of your website visitors turn into leads or customers during your campaign. You can use website traffic analytics to help calculate your conversion rate.
If your campaign creates 100 new website visitors per day or month and 10 of these become qualified leads or complete a desired action, your conversion rate is 10%.
Social Media Engagement
This metric measures how your targets and customers interact with your social media content. It includes shares, reposts, likes, comments, and click-throughs on website links.
You can track customer engagement metrics via social media analytics dashboards or through your marketing agency’s analytics dashboards. While most of these are vanity KPIs, they can help you fine-tune your content marketing tactics by highlighting what appeals to your audience.
Website Visits by Traffic Source
While tracking website traffic, you can pinpoint where visitors came from at every stage of the sales and marketing funnels. In this way, you can categorize leads according to various aspects of a campaign, like emails, social media, paid search, or display ads.
This metric helps you realize which types of marketing have the most impact at each stage of the buyer journey.
Knowledge Is Power in Marketing
Learning how to measure marketing campaign effectiveness can help you make every dollar you spend on marketing work harder for you.
As you learn what works and what doesn’t, you can focus your budget on areas where you earn the best returns, and you’ll also spend less time compiling effective marketing campaigns.
Keep browsing our website for more information on the intricacies of marketing and growing your business.
