10 Helpful Tips to Measure the Success of Your Marketing Campaigns

Work goes into marketing initiatives. It requires preparation and strategy, from idea generation and content creation to publication and content distribution. You want your campaign to be successful once it is live, but how can you tell if it was successful? By measuring your findings accurately. You may gain the insights you need to know what works, what doesn’t, and how you can get better moving forward with a sound measuring framework. Fortunately, we can assist you there.

10 Tips to Measure Your Marketing Campaigns

Long before your campaign even starts, start positioning yourself for success. From the beginning, you must decide how you will define success and what metrics will be most useful. Here’s how to make sure you achieve that—and gain the insights you need to improve along the way.

1) Set Goals and Timelines

You must understand how your campaign fits into your bigger objectives before you begin brainstorming ideas or creating content for it. What specifically are you attempting to accomplish, and when must it be done? We advise establishing OKRs (objectives and key outcomes) on a regular basis, such as monthly, quarterly, or even annually. With this knowledge, you can keep the momentum of your campaign going and make sure you’re set up to follow them effectively.

2) Establish a Reporting Foundation

The first step to figuring out whether your efforts are successful is understanding your present marketing environment. Establish benchmarks first to ascertain:

• How you’re doing right now
• How well you’re doing in comparison to industry standards

Establish your broad benchmarks first, then look for comparable industry benchmarks. We’d advise beginning with a generic KPI document to update on a weekly or monthly basis (for instance, here’s a useful snapshot for social media marketing).

This will eventually enable you to see the overall advancements that your campaigns are making. Remember: The more you report, the sooner you’ll be able to see problems and adjust.

3) Identify Your KPI (and Stick to Them)

Every marketing effort ought to have a distinct objective and measurable KPI. Key performance indicators (KPI) are the most crucial metrics that define the success of your campaign.

For instance, if you want to use digital marketing to raise brand awareness, your success might be tracked by KPI in the form of impressions, engagement, or click-throughs.

Here are some standard metrics to take into account for each stage of the buyer’s journey if you’re unsure of what to measure.

AWARENESS

• Reach:
  • Impressions
  • Views
  • Publication pickup
  • Social content metrics
  • Organic traffic (SEO)
  • Perception:
  • Brand indexes/surveys
  • Social sentiment
  • CONSIDERATION

• Engagement:
  • Traffic
  • Time on site
  • Lead gen rate
  • Leads (not yet qualified)
  • DECISION-MAKING

• Conversions:
  • Leads
  • Qualified leads
  • MQLs
  • SALs
  • POST-PURCHASE

• Satisfaction and advocacy:
  • Product usage
  • Customer review scores
  • Product registrations
  • Account renewals
  • Product return rate
  • Social fans/follows

Even though you have chosen your KPI, you can still be required to report on additional data (e.g., if higher-ups want products purchased or emails captured). Don’t let yourself or your team become overly focused on deeper data, even though it may (and should) be used to learn from in future campaigns.

Objectives and KPI are formed since you can’t do everything at once, so remember what you came to do and force yourself to gauge the success based off those precise KPI.

4) Set up Your Tools

There is nothing more distressing than losing a lot of important data due to a malfunction. (We know this from firsthand experience.) Thus, after you know what you’ll be measuring, set up your tools and test them—before you launch. This could entail establishing UTM codes or setting up pixels for conversion tracking.

5) Start with a Test Run

Don’t be so quick to spend your entire ad campaign in one go. Start by spending slowly and A/B testing a few of your campaign components. To help you understand what your marketing campaigns need to be successful, you can test ad creative, ad copy, or even audience ad sets.

The best way to spend less money more wisely in the beginning is to spend the majority of your budget on tried-and-true assets after you’ve finished testing.

6) Give People a Second Chance

Don’t forget retargeting! This allows you to deliver adverts directly to those who have already visited your website or a specified landing page for your marketing campaign. Sometimes it takes more than one impression for someone to decide they want to connect with your material, so keep them in a retargeting cycle to give them the option to make that decision down the road, and enhance your success rate.

7) Consider the Real ROI

It’s critical to keep in mind the initial investment when gauging the success of a marketing effort. All successful campaigns have strong teams, creatives, strategists, etc. behind them. These resources—your team’s time, the cost of production and editing, etc.—have a cost associated. Though it’s sometimes disregarded, having the numbers at hand to determine whether your investment was worthwhile in light of the results is a crucial decision-making component. Some marketing initiatives provide excellent results, but if they also cost millions to create, the outcomes ought to demonstrate value in line with that cost.

8) Turn Your Data into Valuable Insights

Too frequently, we develop the terrible habit of preparing reports merely to complete them. You end up with a spreadsheet full of meaningless values and jumbled figures. Making the effort to transform that data into information that can be used is essential. (Just imagine that every report will be seen by a C-level executive.) Find the story your data tells by going back and looking for patterns, trends, and takeaways after you’ve extracted the information.

Data storytelling can be helpful here, enabling you to actually “see” what that info means. If you need help analysing it and follow our advice to identify the stories in your data, utilise our Data Visualization 101 tutorial to bring your numbers to life, or check out a handy tool like Visage, which helps you generate custom reports.

Remember: It’s a problem if you don’t have any takeaways or lessons learnt. Perhaps you mismeasured or you didn’t spend enough time carefully examining the outcomes.

9) Be Aware of Outside Influences

It’s critical to take into account any external influences or outliers that could affect your findings. For instance, your campaign might have resulted in a substantial boost in website traffic, but it might also have coincided with a significant product launch.

Whenever you notice anything out of the ordinary, seek out the source so you can have a complete view of your marketing ecology (e.g., check your referral links in Google Analytics, or talk to your product marketing or PR teams to see if they have any insights.)

These variables don’t lessen the value of your data, but they must be taken into account when evaluating the findings and making decisions based on them. Try to be aware of all the moving parts that influence your reporting because there are frequently multiple causes for trends, whether they are favourable or bad.

10) Return on ad spend (ROAS)

This metric tells you how much you earned from ads in comparison to how much you spent on them. Low ROAS suggests that your advertising campaign needs to be improved.
Do you want to know more Tips to Measure Your Marketing Campaigns? Contact us today at support@sunnydayconsulting.com or check our website at www.sunnydayconsulting.com.