Measure your marketing success

So you've read "Planning a great content campaign", you have all this great content and have sorted out your SEO. Now you want to measure your success. Fantastic!

Success means different things to different businesses. It depends on the platforms you use, where your customer base is, the size and maturity of your business, and your prospect base. Determining the data that helps you measure and improve your outreach, growing your business, can be an ever-moving goal post, but it will pay off.

What data should I use?

Think about the data points that make sense for you and the marketing activity that you're monitoring.

Decide whether it is for a specific campaign, long term newsletter improvements or social media outreach.

For email campaigns, look at open rates and click-throughs as an indication of how people are engaging with your emails. For a social post or advert, use the number of views, likes and shares, from your posts. For large campaigns with a mix of marketing activities, a blend of these would be ideal. Be sure to include URL or link tracking, as it will help you understand where your audience originates. For example, if you are running an event, you may want to know what activity has been the most effective at getting attendees to sign up. Looking at this information will enable you to focus resources of time and money on what attracts the most people.

Measure what is meaningful to you, review the data from previous activities that you have done. Take an average of these figures to give yourself a baseline, but be sure that the benchmark you are using is relevant for your campaign. Engagement stats for a social media account that you have had running for many years will, in all likelihood, be hig

her than the forwarding levels that you have for a marketing newsletter that you have only had running for a couple of months. Conversely, a click-through rate may be higher from a newsletter, as those who have signed up are already engaged and interested in your business.

How can I improve my statistics?

Try A/B testing your emails and social posts. Try different word choices in your call to action - "Check this out" instead of "Click here". It can also mean trialling sending your campaigns or posts out at different times of the day or days of the week. Although you can do this with social posts, it is easier to test when sending out email campaigns, by dividing your sender list. For instance, you have a list of 100 email addresses; you would send 25 people Email A and 25 people Email B, then based on the data, you would send the better performing email (either A or B) to the other 50 email addresses. When doing this with social media posts it's better to change one thing on an individual post or advert that is part of a larger campaign that runs for longer than a week. Each week, change either the call to action wording or the header text. However, you may need to consider other variables when sending out your posts. Was England playing Italy in the Euro's the night before? If so, posting about your new Italian restaurant might not be as well-received as it would otherwise have been, which will impact your campaign statistics.

Be mindful when trialling A/B testing that there is only one change between the emails or posts. If the time of day is different, keep the day and the wording the same. If you alter the subject line or heading, keep the body of the text the same. For call-to-action links or buttons, swap the wording but keep the positioning, colour and the rest of the text identical.

Why is all this important?

Monitoring your efforts over time will improve your understanding of the changes in the behaviour of your audiences. Although it is easy to find average open rates or engagement statistics online for benchmarking, keep in mind that this will be different for every business. A bakery's busiest time might be during the summer wedding season or Christmas. A financial services company will be busiest during the end of year close, but very quiet during summer holidays. Additionally, don't beat yourself up if your brand new start-up doesn't have the same open rates as a multinational 50-year-old company!

Although there may not be a one-size-fits-all approach, making sure that you collate and understand your data will help you determine your benchmark. So you can work out which activities work for your business and bring the best return on the investment of time and money.

Following the trends in your stats yearly, monthly and weekly will build better insight into your average stats. Therefore, you can spot when your engagement skyrockets, will know what caused it and can replicate it going forward.

Wrapped your head around all of that? What next?

As with anything, many things can change with time. Keep testing, trialling and innovating. Set up a report that makes sense to you and your needs. It doesn't matter if it's a fancy widget on your website or CRM system, a spreadsheet that you update every week or month, or a table in a notebook - just make sure that you use it and don't lose it!

However, if you are a bit stuck, have some questions, or want a hand with your spreadsheet (I do love a spreadsheet!). Drop me a message, I would be happy to help!