We all love the excitement and buzz of running a marketing campaign.
Yet campaigns cost money, so that spending, needs to be evaluated.
Measuring the impact of a campaign can feel challenging. There are so many metrics to choose from – which ones are the most important? And how do you go about finding these numbers?
Measuring the success of your campaign doesn’t need to be difficult. It’s easier than you might think to build up a picture of how your campaign has performed.
Measuring the success of your marketing campaign
Prepare yourself, here come some abbreviations and industry-specific terms. Useful if you know them, but yet another thing to Google if you’re starting out and finding your way through the maze of business jargon.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness tells you how well your target audience recognises and remembers your brand. It can be measured using surveys, social media mentions, and website traffic. You can also use this information to learn how your target audience feels about your brand. This gives you an indication of how positive your target audience is towards your brand, something that’s just as important as awareness.
It’s recommended that you continuously track your brand awareness and related measures as well as log your company’s position before a campaign. This way it’s easier to identify how your campaign has benefitted awareness.
Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement metrics help you understand the level of engagement your campaign generates with your target audience. Measuring likes, shares, and comments on your social media tells you how hard your campaign is working for you.
There’s another benefit to measuring engagement. Social media is famously adaptable; if engagement isn’t as strong as you’d like, it’s easy to make a few tweaks and shift your engagement figures in the right direction.
Website Traffic
So, if your awareness is good and your social media engagement is strong, what’s happening to your website traffic? Website traffic tracks the number of visitors to your website, tells you how long they stay on your website, which pages they visit, and how they interact with your content.
It’s tempting to get caught up by the overall number of visitors to your site. However, we’d recommend sense-checking for sanity ahead of vanity. Instead of getting caught up with the number of visitors you’ve attracted to your site, track them, and see what actions they take. Work with the information you have to build up a picture of what’s going on. Metrics such as bounce rate and time on page provide a great deal of insight about your website.
Conversion Rate
This is where things start getting really interesting. Conversion rate tells you how many people have taken a specific action as a result of your campaign. This could be buying something, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. It’s good to remember that the conversion rate isn’t always immediate – you may find your campaign has a strong decay rate and is converting people after the campaign has ended.
Return on Investment (ROI)
It’s pretty likely you’ve heard of this one in some form or another – ROI compares the revenue generated by your campaign to the overall cost of running the campaign.
There’s good reason for this being a bit of a celebrity in the world of post-campaign analytics – after all, why would you embark on any form of marketing if you don’t expect to get a return? However, ROI is often overlooked in a post-campaign analysis. This means missing out on a key piece of information – did your campaign deliver more revenue than it cost to run it?
Despite its high profile, a positive ROI isn’t the be-all and end-all of a campaign. While it’s certainly preferable to see an immediate return on the investment spent on a campaign, sometimes the return will take longer to present itself. And that’s why it’s good to consider a range of metrics when evaluating a campaign.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Imagine knowing how much it costs to acquire a new customer. That’s what the CAC metric tells you. Using Customer Acquisition Cost to evaluate your campaign helps you understand the most efficient way of attracting new customers. As you’d expect, a lower CAC indicates a more efficient campaign.
By understanding the CAC of various campaigns, you get an idea of how much it will cost to reach your goals and which activities will be the most effective and efficient in helping you do this.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
This is the kind of long-term data that we love. Customer lifetime value estimates the value of a customer over their lifetime with your brand. Tracking CLV helps you understand the long-term impact of your marketing efforts. For instance, are you attracting loyal customers who stay with you for many years, or are you churning through customers quickly?
Here’s a great example. Sending out a postcard as a piece of marketing 18 years ago resulted in producing a small advert. This started a relationship with a new client that grew into multiple new relationships with marketing directors, sales directors and CEOs for two global companies. This single postcard campaign has returned room 11 annual revenues of tens of thousands of pounds.
Ready to create a strong campaign?
The most important factor in measuring the output of your marketing campaign is agreeing on your objectives in the brief. With this, we’ll work hard to make sure your next campaign is hard-wired to deliver.
We’d love the chance to talk these points through and help with your forthcoming campaigns. Call us and we can chat!