Marketing campaigns take a lot of work. From scoping and strategizing to executing and reporting, even small campaigns can involve multiple moving pieces and lots of planning. 

With so much work involved it’s important to understand if those efforts have been successful or if they need to be reworked for next time. No one wants to tie up resources in campaigns they’re not confident will get results. Whether that’s new email addresses, brand exposure, or new leads, implementing the right tracking from the start will make repeating winning campaigns a breeze. 

5 Tips for Measuring Marketing Results

Setting yourself up for success starts long before any campaign assets have been created. Understanding what will need to be tracked and how is the first step in tying tracking back to marketing. Ensuring there is a process in place for planning campaigns can help avoid any loopholes in tracking. Tie in these tips when creating your strategic process and you’ll be good to go!

1. Establish Your Goals Upfront

The hallmark of any good marketing campaign is having established goals right from the start, along with measurable Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) for those goals. When it comes to setting a marketing goal, there are usually only a handful of options. The goals are usually one of three things: lead/sales generation, brand awareness, or fan base growth. 

Unfortunately, there are many metrics that will help track any of these three broad goals. Deciding which marketing performance metrics are the best for a campaign will come down to the details. For example, working to increase email signups probably means that the most important metric to track would be growth of the email list. However, if you’re using a freebie or special landing page to attract new sign ups, you might also want to track pageviews, bounce rate, and other landing page success metrics. 

The KPIs might change from campaign to campaign or they might stay the same for all. It will depend on the goals and which metrics you deem as important. 

2. Know the ROI

Now that you know what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll want to know how much you’re willing to spend to achieve it. It’s been a long time since digital marketing wasn’t a pay-to-play space so every marketing campaign is an investment. Whether that investment is ad dollars or people, there is business capital on the line.

This is where customer lifetime values and some quick math can come in handy. If your campaign is to gain more email subscribers and each email subscriber is a potential customer who could spend $XX, then you can figure out how many subscribers you would need to make this a worthwhile investment. 

Remember, understanding ROI isn’t just important for paid campaigns. Time is a value investment and time spent creating and executing these takes away from the marketing team working on other projects. If these campaigns are costing lots of manpower, but not yielding expected results, it’s good to re-evaluate. 

3. Know Your Metrics

Most marketing campaigns are not a simple graphic and a social post. They are a complex ecosystem of visual assets, social media posts, emails, landing pages, and paid placements. Each piece has its own set of reporting for measuring marketing results. 

Don’t worry! You don’t need to know them all to do effective marketing, but you do need to know which ones are important for your goals. Measuring social media success is going to be different from what makes an effective email campaign. 

Even though the end goal may be something like landing page views, you’ll still want to track performance on the assets that are pushing people to the landing page like social posts, ads, and email. This is how marketers troubleshoot campaigns while they are running. Sometimes a simple copy change in an ad can start giving you the results you really wanted.

4. Tie in All Your Tracking

This is where knowing your metrics can save the day! In today’s landscape, most marketing teams use a martech stack of various tools to help create a single campaign. One campaign might need not only social posts, but also a landing page and a follow up email. All these assets come with reporting and metrics on their individual elements. 

For example, using a separate landing page builder, email service provider, and social media scheduler means you’ll be looking for metrics in 3 separate places to get a holistic view of what’s going on. Instead of pulling in all the data from each of these services, by focusing on the goals and key KPIs teams can center their attention on pulling in the most relevant metrics into one, actionable report.

Ideally, as a company grows its marketing capabilities using an all-in-one marketing automation tool that does the jobs of these separate systems all in one place makes it incredibly easy to report on, manage, and make changes to campaigns. If growing marketing efforts is a main goal for the business, considering a marketing automation tool can be a perfect way to streamline. 

5. Learn as You Go

The point of measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is to make them better. Don’t be so quick to flip that off switch when you’re not seeing the results you want! By understanding the metrics that happen along the way, it gives marketers an opportunity to spot check if improvements can be made while the campaigns are still running.

The most successful teams include measuring marketing results as part of their process through the duration of the campaign. For example, when running a lead generation campaign, assets might include a landing page with a form for lead capture, ads pushing people to the landing page, and emails to prospects. Reporting throughout means you can catch if lead numbers aren’t where they need to be and make a change — it doesn’t mean the campaign is a failure!

Looking at landing page metrics like bounce rate or ad metrics like CTR can point to a problem. Maybe there aren’t enough people going through your ad to the landing page. Here a simple copy or asset change could start getting you the results you wanted!

Key Takeaways

The path to successful marketing strategies isn’t a secret! It takes some planning, goal setting, and reporting. If the plan is to ramp up marketing for your company, then metrics and data are about to become your best friends. 

Moving forward, your marketing strategy process should include:

  • Setting goals as part of the planning process
  • Deciding which KPIs to track
  • Tying all the marketing pieces together

Don’t forget! As marketing efforts grow, using an all-in-one marketing automation tool streamlines this whole process and gives marketers quick and easy access to insights quickly.

SharpSpring is pleased to be a Build a Better Agency (BABA) Summit sponsor!