When working how to measure the success of a marketing campaign, far too many businesses forget two key metrics: bad leads vs. qualified leads, and more importantly: did the campaign directly generate revenue?
If you’ve read other marketing articles on poliARC then you already know some of our biases. Two of the strongest: advertising alone is not marketing, and social media marketing is meaningless if you don’t have a system to track it from click to sale. Measuring marketing success requires each channel to be part of a larger system that you can track. Start with the specific advertising sources, then move up from there.
Display advertising and social media marketing are two parts of your larger marketing campaigns and strategy. To measure the success of marketing, then, you need to be able to track each marketing channel individually, as well as understand how one effort might influence the other within the whole system (i.e. if you boost social marketing, does that help convert your SEM leads?).
Lead tracking requires being smart and planning how you implement your campaign. Marketing is more than just “cool advertising”. It’s creating a marketing system. Building structure within your marketing operations so that you are able to track the results. Thankfully, if you plan ahead it’s not as hard to measure the success of advertising and social media as it used to be. The technology exists. You simply have to build it into your campaign and sales methods.
The reason I mention your entire marketing campaign vs. individual facets is because businesses must first have a system to track marketing campaigns from first click to post-purchase satisfaction. It is not enough to measure success if all you have is how much money you spend on ad campaigns, and how much you made in a the same period – you need to be able to track all the steps in between for each person. If you’re not using a CRM or surveying your customers, then you will never measure overall marketing success. To an extent you’ll always be guessing – especially if you use many different marketing channels. Step one to measure marketing success is having a system to track customers from the initial inquiry all the way through the customer life cycle. If you don’t have that yet: do it now, then come back and read the rest.
Too many companies measure the success of their marketing with non-revenue based metrics, which results in an incomplete picture of marketing effectiveness. If you hire a “social media guru” – as so many love to call themselves – many provide only metrics along the lines of follower numbers and engagement – with no idea whatsoever if any of that directly leads to a sale. That doesn’t help you in any other way than make you feel good about having followers and likes… neither of those things are revenue.
If you’re working with a marketing company that only gives you data like facebook likes, and how many twitter followers you have: run away! If all you want is social media awareness and a lot of fans, then hire a college kid to do it for you, or go to Fiverr. A real social media campaign, however tracks likes, engagement, and most importantly the impact on sales. Without income you’re not measuring the true success of a marketing campaign. Business isn’t about making friends.
It’s about making money. All those companies who promise 1000 fans of your page will give you what they promise, but hardly any of those fans will convert to sales (… plus, these days a high percentage of facebook likes are fake accounts, anyway.).
Don’t get me wrong, social media metrics and advertising impression numbers are helpful: impressions, frequency, engagement, sales leads, etc., but none of them tell you the bottom line of measuring marketing success: how much money did the company make as a result of this campaign? I often squirm when creating a marketing report, because sometimes the answer to that key measurement question is either impossible to answer due to having no tracking systems place, or the campaign did’t directly result in sales at all. Truthfully, I’d rather have the latter scenario: no success, because at least that means we know what’s happening doesn’t work and we need to try something else. Knowing something is better than guessing, and marketing failure happens all the time. If we don’t fail, then we can’t succeed.
The good news for marketing and measuring its success online is we all have access to a free service: Google Analytics. Page and click tracking, heat maps, multivariate testing – all those fancy Internet terms we can use for online marketing that helps track marketing success. If you’re not looking at traffic on your website while campaigns are running, then you’re missing a large part of the picture.
Measuring Marketing Success:
Break down your marketing campaigns as specifically as you possibly can; all the way to different tracking variables for each user if you want (or at least returning costumers vs. new). The point segmenting: create the direct sales path as much as you can from interest to sale. If you can track that while simultaneously knowing what campaign created the interest, then you can find which campaigns generate revenue for your business.
Create your marketing campaigns so that for every unique piece (banner ads, text ads, videos, television, direct mail, etc.) have
- Unique offers.
- Unique web pages for each offer.
- Ad variations (images, slogans, etc.)
You can the then take those three parts of an typical advertisement and shuffle them: one offer that’s tested on different marketing mediums, each with its own landing page on your website). Once you control where people land, then you can track which campaign is successful and which ones you should no longer run.
Of course: even with landing pages, not all people will enter your website on that specific page (they might just type in the domain name). But if your home page highlights the specific offers, then by tracking those clicks you can get a decent idea which ads are working. Offsetting the timing of each campaign helps in this process.
When you compile your reports to measure the success of your marketing campaigns, you want to have both the wide lens as well as the targeted sales paths. Putting all that data into a comprehensive report helps you identify more broad trends or successes from your total marketing plan as well as each piece.
This is where you need to have people on your marketing team who can identify positive marketing trends (and negative trends), but also have insight into your entire marketing process – sometimes you’ll have so many different campaigns and advertising channels that it becomes overwhelming and difficult to assess what’s working and what isn’t vs. what works in conjunction with another channel or medium. (Note: that’s also why offsetting timing can help focus the process.) It’s possible that one piece never results in a direct sale, but its addition to your marketing mix results in an overall increase of revenue.
