It doesn’t matter what size business that you have; all companies have marketing needs and expenses. If you aren’t tracking and measuring how effective your marketing is, the bottom line is that you are losing money.
Measuring marketing campaign effectiveness is your way to ensure you are getting the biggest bang for your marketing bucks; not doing so is like driving at night with no headlights.
Why Measuring Marketing Campaign Effectiveness Matters
By measuring how effective your marketing campaigns are, you will see which is working best to allocate more of your budget there and reduce spending on campaigns that aren’t working for you.
Another key benefit is that anytime you study any analytics about your business, it allows you to see new patterns and gain insight into how your business performs. Interpreting this information will also give you valuable insight into your ideal customers.
Key Performance Indicators You Should Be Tracking
By measuring and analyzing key performance indicators (KPI), you can gain more insight into the specific results of your marketing attempts.
Some of the KPIs you should consider monitoring are:
Return on Investment (ROI): This is the amount you make in sales from a specific campaign. If posting flyers cost $100 and you made $300 in sales from the flyers, then the ROI is 300% or 3:1. ROI is a very good way to compare advertising campaigns in an “apples to apples” way.
Cost per Lead: This will help you to understand exactly how effective your marketing is. However, this method does not give you an accurate picture of how well qualified these leads were or their quality.
Cost Per Conversion: A conversion can technically be many things but this is typically used to measure a purchase of some sort and how much it cost to get that purchase.
Incremental Sales: This number defines how many sales came from a specific marketing or advertising attempt. Like ROI, it shows the overall effectiveness of a campaign.
Tips for Measuring Marketing Campaign Performance
It is very important that you have a system in place before starting any advertising or marketing efforts. Make sure to define the dates of your campaign and don’t overlap it with other marketing campaigns and sales. Otherwise, you will not know which efforts may have contributed to your sales.
Add Google Analytics to your site as well as Facebook Pixel. For Google, you need to add goals and events and add events for Facebook as well. Adding these can get complicated, so you can find an expert to do this for you that won’t cost you a tremendous amount of money, such as Xceptional.
Tricks for Easier Measuring of Marketing Campaign Effectiveness
If you employ a more complex strategy, such as using an influencer, you will need to be more careful in tabulating your results, as they may not always be clear-cut. In this type of scenario, you will need to make sure that you have established a baseline and clear goal.
In this example, it would be important to know exactly how many followers you had before you began work with the influencer, as well as how many followers you normally gain on your own each day. This will allow you to understand better how much using this specific social media influencer is actually moving the needle for you. In addition, this will enable you to determine a cost per follower and even compare the contributions of different influencers on your marketing efforts.
Whichever methods that you choose, the important thing is to make sure that you are always tracking your marketing campaign effectiveness and always analyzing it to get better.