Recently we discussed the challenges of determining the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. We cited a McKinsey & Company report showing that many companies don’t make any effort whatsoever to measure the success of their marketing efforts, and we discussed that there is a variety of variables that can make objective comparisons difficult.
However, rest assured that you can, in fact, measure the results of your marketing investment. As Content Marketing Institute discusses, there are a variety of key performance indicators that you can use in your analysis. The article gives some KPIs and some specific examples of each:
- Brand awareness: website traffic; page views; referral links, downloads, etc.
- Engagement: blog comments; likes, shares, retweets, inbound links; etc.
- Lead generation: forum completions and downloads; email subscriptions; blog subscriptions; conversion rate
- Sales: online sales; offline sales; manual reporting and anecdotes; etc.
- Customer retention and loyalty: Percentage of content consumed by existing customers; retention/renewal rates
- Upsell/cross-sell: sales for new products and services
These KPIs are part of a larger process advocated in the article for the initial stages of your marketing analysis. First, you need to define your goals. Maybe you have only one or two, but you might have many, and each goal should be analyzed according to specific KPIs. Once you’ve identified your goals and the associated KPIs, you need a plan for collecting and reporting that data. Where are you getting your information? This might be much easier in an online setting with tools such as Google Analytics; however, it’s certainly possible in the offline world as well. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, how are you going to analyze your results? Data is great, but you need to be able to draw actionable conclusions from it.
As noted in the article “Five Lessons in Marketing Data Analysis for Beginners,” it’s quite common to misread marketing data and see causation that’s not really there. The article provides some good basic questions to ask when digging into your data collection results and suggests using statistical analysis to vet that data. (Don’t worry; it’s not as scary as it sounds).
Analyzing the success of a marketing campaign may seem more abstract and difficult than measuring the results of more tangible business functions like finance or operations; however, the right tools are out there if you know where to look. Putting your marketing efforts through the same rigorous evaluation as you would with the other elements of your business can help ensure your money is being spent well.
Recommended Reading:
The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement
Tags: analytics, Marketing, marketing measurement, measuring ROI, ROI