The directives of marketing are clear. Make it measurable. Make insights actionable. Make it repeatable.
These guides are essential for translating marketing from a soft discipline to hard science. It’s also an essential component to getting investors, C-suite executives, and sales and marketing teams on the same page.
But it’s easier said than done.
To help you thrive in the digital environment, here’s a guide on how to measure the success of your digital marketing campaign.
How To Measure The Success Of Your Digital Marketing Campaign
Let’s start off by stating the obvious. There’s no such thing as a boilerplate marketing campaign.
Anyone who’s telling you they can sell you a successful marketing template without knowing the specifics of your company likely has a bridge in Brooklyn for you to buy, as well.
This is actually good news for us marketers, especially when you learn to measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns. It will root your thinking, and your process, in the Scientific Method.
Scientific thinking is essential in cutting out the variables and accessing the real over fleeting impressions.
Here’s some steps you can undertake to determine your marketing campaign’s success.
Define Success
Firstly and most importantly, you need to determine your definition of success. This requires you getting clear on your business goals.
Right away, you can see how creating an effective marketing campaign helps to streamline and optimize your business plan.
Say your goal for this quarter is to increase brand awareness. To measure the success of this digital marketing campaign, you’ll want to measure page views, likes, shares, and – most importantly – engagement.
With that being said, while brand awareness and thought leadership are always valuable goals to pursue, you should always be angling towards actual conversions and sales. Don’t resort to pushy or exploitative sales or marketing techniques, which can do more harm than good.
Embrace Automation
You’ll need to eliminate variables to determine this effectively, however. Automation is an endlessly useful tool for eliminating variables and getting clear insights.
For instance, say you create a blog post you want people to share. You’ll want to do a little bit of keyword research, as well, but that’s more of an SEO-related topic.
Once you’ve got some content to promote, schedule your social media to post at specific times. This will give a clearer indication of what’s working and what isn’t than posting blindly to your social media.
At this point, let’s take a moment to talk about deciding on what networks to focus on. Not every group of potential customers lurks on every social media site. 40% of Twitter users are between the ages of 20 – 49, for instance.
30% of Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year use Twitter, as well. Studying social media demographics will give you an idea of how to present your marketing assets as attractively as possible.
Looking at those Twitter numbers, for instance, suggests that a large number of Twitter users are young and reasonably well-off. It’d be a safe bet to assume they’re well educated, as well, based off of those first two statistics.
Slightly more technical content and language is more likely to flourish on Twitter than, say, more personal networks like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.
Decide On Your Measure Tools
As marketers, we’re dealing with more data from more sources than ever before. This can be both a blessing and a curse.
Luckily, there’s a nearly endless number of Customer Relations Management (CRM) software on the market.
CRM software brings all of your marketing data into one dashboard. This is endlessly useful for bridging the gap between different data channels. It also helps offer an insight into how your marketing and sales teams are performing, as well.
CRM software might monitor social media networks for mentions of your company, for instance, and scrape that user feedback into a database. These insights are even more invaluable than direct marketing research, as polls and surveys can skew and distort the data in a number of ways.
CRM software also helps to bridge the macro- and the micro-view of your marketing campaigns. You can look at overall trends for a marketing campaign while simultaneously keeping an eye on an individual customer’s history.
Comparing and contrasting this data can yield some fascinating insights, into both an individual customer and your overall marketing campaign. It also offers a lens with which to view your entire industry.
Monitoring Your Marketing Throughout A Campaign
Real-time analytics are one of the most powerful things about digital marketing. Historically, marketers had to rely on bulky, costly, and time-consuming studies like market research for marketing insights.
They’d have to wait even longer to implement those insights.
Digital marketing puts that process into warp speed. You can gather and evaluate decisions continuously and adjust your marketing campaign accordingly. What once took months if not years can be handled daily, at this point.
Evaluate, Rinse, and Repeat
Like any good science experiment, you should have a clear time frame on your marketing campaign to determine its ultimate success. At the end of that cycle, you should look at the overall successes and failures of your marketing campaign.
This will help you determine what was effective, and carry those lessons forward
Measuring digital marketing can offer insight into other branches of your marketing efforts, as well. Maybe you notice that your audience responds strongly to informative articles being posted first thing in the morning, for instance.
You can turn those metrics into advice into how your social media marketing strategy. You can also extrapolate some of these signals into signs of possible pain points for your customers and clients.
Want To Know More About Mastering Digital Marketing?
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