You can use marketing strategies throughout the day, but if they’re not effective, those efforts won’t matter in the long run.
Measuring marketing effectiveness is critical to improving your go-to strategies over time. Are your methods achieving KPIs? Do you help your customers achieve short and long term milestones? Use each campaign to learn and grow.
By measuring marketing effectiveness, you can better ensure a high ROI, or Return on Marketing Investment, ROMI.
Measure marketing effectiveness
How do you measure the effectiveness of marketing? Sure, you can look at traffic or sales metrics, but there is more.
Ultimately, the KPIs you want to measure may vary depending on your company and strategy. However, there are a few metrics to look out for when measuring marketing effectiveness.
When looking at sales, the first thing to consider is how much of the sales are a direct result of marketing efforts. This can help provide a clear, high-level view of how successful the marketing efforts are for the company.
Next, consider pipeline ROI, or pipeline growth. Are you generating more and more leads through your marketing efforts? If not, your marketing effectiveness could stall.
Conversion rates are also a strong KPI to review. Remember, impressions, views, and even clicks don’t necessarily make a successful marketing strategy. If users click but don’t make a purchase, why don’t they convert? Conversion rates can give you a better insight into the success of your marketing.
When looking at long-term effectiveness, consider retention rates. Do customers stay with your company long term or do they shop and leave a few times? Don’t forget to keep marketing to existing customers while reaching new audiences at the same time.
Marketing Effectiveness Metrics
The types of metrics you consider may also vary by medium. In the past, marketing efforts focused on tangible but harder to measure media such as billboards, magazines or television.
Nowadays, digital marketing is at the forefront and with it a multitude of things that need to be measured to determine its effectiveness. Here are three top marketing segments and metrics to consider for each.
1. Effectiveness of social media marketing
Social media marketing is new to the scene, but it can be huge for business revenue and lead generation. Measuring marketing effectiveness on social media is pretty straightforward.
It’s easy to track the number of inquiries or leads through closed content on social media, and engagement can also be tracked through reposts / shares, comments, and the number of followers.
The conversion rate also plays a role here. If your account has a high number of followers but comparatively low engagement rates, you can start exploring where to tweak your social marketing strategy for increased engagement, leads, and sales.
2. Content Marketing Effectiveness
Content marketing is extensive and offers opportunities to market through a website, videos, articles, courses, and other digital content. The goal is not to say: “Hey, buy my product and get involved with my brand!“, But to provide valuable, informative content for customers.
Because there are so many methods for content marketing, the measurement of effectiveness can vary widely depending on the source. You can check the conversion rates from your website to your online paid course, or you can engage in your informational video or webinar.
3. Effectiveness of email marketing
Email marketing is booming. There are a number of metrics to consider when measuring the effectiveness of email marketing. First of all, you can check the delivery, open and click rates.
High delivery rates mean that your e-mails reach inboxes, but are not only dependent on this metric. Open rates are important because a low open rate can show that you need to focus on writing shorter, more intriguing subject lines.
Of the three, click-through rates are arguably the most important. Do prospects click or open links in the email and delete the email? Click rates offer a higher chance of converting into sales. Again, conversion rate is important and can help measure marketing effectiveness for email, content, social, and traditional marketing methods.
How to showcase the effectiveness of marketing
So you know how to measure marketing effectiveness, but how do you best share this information with outside stakeholders? An insightful marketing report can show customers exactly how effective the last quarter’s marketing campaign was on the business.
These metrics can also be used to request a larger marketing budget or set strategies for the future.
Here’s how to prepare your presentation, starting with the data to include and how to organize it to really show its marketing effectiveness.
Data to Include
Quarterly campaigns are typically reviewed in a marketing report. First, you want to include the marketing strategy goals for this quarter to compare actual results with expected results. Include all marketing methods such as content, social and / or email and the associated KPIs.
Also, include market research to identify the target audience in the report and ensure that external stakeholders know why your strategy is targeting that particular audience using these specific methodologies.
The above KPIs such as conversion rates, social engagement, sales related to marketing campaigns, email click rates and customer retention rates can all be included in the report for external stakeholders.
Organization of the presentation
The presentation should be a meaningful roadmap, starting with the goals and expected outcomes and going through the measured metrics for each type of marketing. Targets can be traffic figures, sales, customer satisfaction or lead generation.
Organize metrics by social media, email, content, and other types of inbound or outbound marketing you’ve tracked over the quarter. You can also write down specific goals and results for each type of marketing.
Don’t forget to include explanations. Share what’s going well and why; Also outline what is subpar, why, and how you plan to approach the next quarter.
KPIs to prove effectiveness
Again, KPIs are crucial to share with external stakeholders as they clearly show the effectiveness of marketing.
For content marketing, view lead generation, conversion rates, bounce rates, and even SEO-related metrics like page rank on the search results page (SERP).
Email marketing should describe delivery, open and click rates. You can also analyze the bounce rate, both for emails returned from unavailable email addresses and from pages on your website that contain email subscriptions. Other email marketing KPIs to consider are number of emails sent, new subscribers for the quarter, and unsubscriptions per email sent.
Social media insights can also focus on lead generation and engagement rates. As Social continues to develop, some sales rates will be measured directly by Social as the platforms add shopping functionality.
Measure marketing effectiveness to inform goals
You could spend weeks putting energy into an email marketing campaign that just isn’t generating the leads you expected, while leads are pouring in through social media despite a lack of targeted efforts.
Without reviewing and analyzing your marketing strategies, it’s hard to know where to best use your time, creative energy, and budget to keep growing your pipeline and sales.
Marketing Effectiveness uses key metrics to identify highs and lows in your marketing strategies so you can share that information with external stakeholders and better inform future strategies and goals.