Best Crucial Steps Needed to Measure a Successful Campaign

Spread the love

Marketing campaigns can be the difference between breaking even and surpassing your sales goals. Whether you are creating your campaigns in-house or contracting an outside company, one of the most important things to know is how successful the campaign was.

But how exactly can you do that? It’s a common question in the business community, so we went looking for a definitive answer. Let’s find out together.

How do you Measure the Success of a Campaign?
What are the Elements of a Successful Campaign?
Why is it Important to Measure the Effectiveness of your Promotions?
How do you Monitor the Progress of a Campaign?
What are the 5 Key Performance Indicators?

How do you Measure the Success of a Campaign?

Measurement is the key to optimizing any process, and marketing campaigns are no exception. When you establish and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for your marketing campaigns, you can clearly see what works and what doesn’t.

You can then direct your marketing dollars toward the most effective campaigns to achieve marketing success. Here are some of the common KPIs you should measure for each of your campaigns, regardless of the type, channel or medium:

1. Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on Investment measures the sales revenue a campaign brings on every dollar spent. For example, if John spent $1,000 on a campaign that generated $5,000 in sales, John’s ROI is $4,000 or 400%. This is the best KPI to measure the effectiveness of all marketing campaigns because it also measures the quality of leads these campaigns generate.

2. Cost per Win (Sale)

Cost per Win measures the expense of each sale. Let’s say that John’s campaign resulted in five sales. With a $1,000 budget, that is $200 per sale. This important metric compares the campaigns to each other.

3. Cost per Lead

Cost per Lead measures the cost-effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This metric focuses entirely on the leads generated by the campaign. Since it factors out the sales process it doesn’t measure the quality of leads. Using the example from above, let’s say the five sales resulted from 10 leads. With the same $1,000 budget, that is a cost of $100 per lead.

4. Conversion Rate (or Goal Completion Rate)

Just as you measure your website’s conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who have converted into leads or customers), you should also measure the same for individual campaigns.

For example, if a campaign brought in 1,000 visitors, from which John got 10 leads, that is a 1% conversion rate. The conversion rate combined with bounce rate and other behavior information reveals a great deal about the quality of traffic to the website.

5. Incremental Sales

Incremental Sales measures the contribution of marketing efforts toward the sales numbers. Incremental sales show the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in generating sales, and are a great way to compare your marketing efforts. For example, if John’s sales for the month were $500,000, the campaign from above resulted in 1% of his total sales.

6. Purchase Funnel

Using Google Analytics (or a similar tool) you should also measure and analyze the sales process for the leads generated by each marketing campaign (for example, conversions and percentages for visits, interactions, leads and sale). This can help you find drop off points that can tell you more about your traffic or your sales cycle.

7. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value measures the lifetime value of your customers by utilizing the following formula: “average sale per customer” multiplied by “average number of times a customer buys per year” multiplied by “average retention time in years for a typical customer.” This data will certainly take time to compile, but by calculating the CLV, you can see which of the marketing efforts generate your best customers.

8. Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution

While you want to measure each of your campaigns and marketing channels separately, in reality there will always be overlaps. For example, a customer learns about your website on social media and then returns to it via a search engine. If you want to see a more precise picture of your marketing, you should use multi-channel funnels and apply attribution modeling.

What are the Elements of a Successful Campaign?

There are some critical components that must go into each marketing campaign; defining these components long before you start is essential to reaching your goals.

Remember that a marketing campaign does not really have an end. It morphs into something new and better. It changes based upon the real-time feedback your company receives.

In fact, it is well understood that one successful campaign leads into a series of changes that make the subsequent campaigns even better. That is the mindset that your team must have moving forward. To help you on your way, here are seven components of effective marketing campaigns.

1. Market Research

Online market research must be supplemented with the knowledge your company gains from the field. Customer-facing appointments, conference calls, and visits provide invaluable insight into what customers want, what they need, and what concerns them most.

That data from the field needs to be clarified, segmented, and cleaned so that it becomes actionable. It is no different that enriching your data through your customer data platform.

Your online research can then be used to back up your claims or reaffirm your assumptions from the field. If you have gathered intelligence on your competitor’s activities through face-to-face customer visits, then checking that intelligence online is merely a matter of reviewing how your market and customers see your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

What are the prevailing themes online about your competitor’s offer and service levels?

News and recent trends are also an important part of your research. Understanding the impact of emerging technologies or competing solutions helps to clarify whether you are pursuing the right opportunities.

Your product development and value proposition all come from your market knowledge, so always be sure to shore up that knowledge with new, up-to-date research.

2. Buyer Personas

Who are you targeting and why? Have you fleshed out your buyer personas and defined why your product or service is the ideal fit for their needs? Again, most companies just launch a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign to increase paid traffic without any idea of whom they are targeting and why. Do not make that same mistake.

Marketing effectiveness comes from a clear understanding of your target audience. However, it is not enough just to identify your target accounts. You need to define how decisions are made, who makes them, and what the most pressing concerns are for the individuals tasked with making purchases.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is not just about optimizing your website. It is not just about revamping a single webpage or making sure the URL is aligned with your company’s name. It is not just about making sure your website is mobile-friendly.

It is really about making sure your entire digital marketing campaign is aligned with the keywords, colloquial sentences, and keyword-phrases used by your buyer personas in online search. It is about making sure your website is optimized for local searches and that all campaigns have SEO as part of their design.

4. Attention-Grabbing Content

Your content has to speak to your buyer personas. It has to be aligned with addressing their biggest concerns. It must provide your business audience with verifiable facts, ones that support your arguments and substantiate your claims.

Ditch the elongated text. Your business audience will not read an endless article. They respond to infographics, vivid images, product breakdowns, business whitepapers, customer case studies, and content geared toward market projections and feasibility studies.

Your content marketing must be optimized for your business audience. Doing that requires a focus on SEO and a thorough understanding of your buyer personas.

5. Optimized Landing Pages

The only way to convert incoming traffic is by having an optimized landing page. That requires reviewing how users interact with your page. It involves understanding if traffic was organic or paid and it involves defining the click-through-rates (CTR) on both traffic sources.

You need to know how much time users spent on your landing page, with what users interacted, on what they clicked, and how they moved about your content. Focus on answering the following questions:

What is your CTR on your content or landing page’s call-to-action (CTA) and is that percentage up or down compared to historical trends on past campaigns?
Are you using a simple lead capture form or are you asking customers to fill out too much information?
Have you structured your content around a convincing solution or are customers abandoning pursuit because
your content is too generic?

Driving traffic without an optimized landing page will quickly tank all your efforts up to this point. Converting visitors into leads must become a science, one where your team is always reviewing your landing page and looking for any insight on how to improve your conversion rates.

Your analytics provide the answers, but your own data, and your ability to leverage that data, will determine success or failure.

6. Lead Nurturing with Marketing Automation

Keeping your buyer personas engaged throughout the buyer’s journey is essential to marketing effectiveness. Every customer action must be met with a response, one in which your content and digital offers push the customer further through the journey until all questions are answered and he or she makes a purchase.

Nurturing your leads means exactly that. Each content piece is an investment. You are planting one seed at a time. Customers that respond to your content and take action are the ones who are buying into your message.

However, you must have a marketing automation platform that continually feeds your leads with engaging content and hard-to-ignore offers. Marketing automation is the tool, but the content is the element that makes the real difference.

7. Data Enrichment and Analytics

Throughout this entire process your marketing database software is enriching your data, making sense of that data, and empowering you to act upon it. Data enrichment helps you improve pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. It helps you increase your CTR on email campaigns and it improves your content.

Your website analytics give you the insight into how each portion of your marketing campaign is performing best. However, it will not help if you are not continually enriching your data and reviewing your real-time results.

An effective marketing campaign begins and ends with research. How you research your target audience and how you research results during a campaign ultimately determine marketing effectiveness. A commitment to research forces you to ask the questions that need to be asked.

Continuously enriching your data and making it relevant helps you answer those questions and makes it easier to make educated decisions that improve a campaign’s effectiveness.

Why is it Important to Measure the Effectiveness of your Promotions?

Having a data-driven approach and measuring your results will show you what your invested funds have achieved, and prove whether your field efforts are actually improving your sales. At the end of the day, data is your biggest ally, as it will tell you where you’ve been, where you’re heading, and where you want to be.

Here are the four main metrics you should use to analyze data on the success of your in-store promotion, as well as some suggestions on how to leverage this data:

1. Profits

Promotions, like other investments, fundamentally work by earning revenue in exchange for a smaller investment. It is important to evaluate the impact of sales promotions on profit because it is possible for promotions to lead to higher sales but lower profits.

Only 30 out of 45 promotions reported as successes are actually successful, while 19 out of 46 promotions reported as failures actually increased profits (Hardy 1986).

In order for a promotion to be profitable, incremental customer sales must increase and the cost of obtaining one dollar in increased sales must not exceed a dollar.

These are measurements you need to pay attention to before, during, and after the promotion, as having solid metrics will give you a clearer view of the effects of your promotion.

2. Sales Volume

In order to accurately measure the increase in sales volume, you need to know your baseline (what sales were prior to the promotion) using both data you’ve already collected and data you collect throughout the duration of the promotion. This equation can be used to find your overall increase in sales.

3. Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a key facet to customer loyalty and long-term brand switching, so it is important that you measure customer satisfaction by collecting data to measure exactly how satisfied customers were with your promotion and with your overall product.

Some things to look at: Did you experience more out of stocks than usual because your product was flying off the shelves? What are people saying about your brand or product online?

If you are interested in gaining deeper insight, try inviting your customers to fill out a quick survey or use a hashtag with the promo to tell you what they think of your brand. Using the information you gather, you’ll be able to hear the truth of what customers thought of your promotion.

4. Achievement of Set Goals

Take another look at goals you set for the promotion. Does your data show that you have achieved them? While the principal, overarching goal of your promotion should have been to boost sales and increase brand recognition, another main goal of your promotion should be to record and analyze the results for future use.

Even if your promotion was not “successful” in the way you planned, having accurate measurements of all of the factors at hand will allow you and your team to identify areas for improvement.

As we mentioned earlier, sometimes a promotion can seem successful on the surface, but can actually have negative effects on long term profits. Make sure you are setting multiple goals ahead of your promotion so you are able to track metrics for all of them and determine the true effectiveness of your efforts.

The most successful promotions have these features:

friendly, communicative, and knowledgeable promoter
good in-store positioning
full stock of product
harmonized appearance of marketing materials
focus on brand recognition and increasing brand loyalty

From planning to implementing to analyzing, documenting the entire process of a promotion is vital to making it a success. But the only way to determine whether your promotions are truly effective is by accurately measuring the four metrics: profits, sales volume, customer satisfaction, and achievement of goals.

Having these measurements makes your life easier when analyzing the outcome of your promotions, and empowers you to Learn from your mistakes and take note of what you did well. Next time, your promotions will be guaranteed to be even more successful.

How do you Monitor the Progress of a Campaign?

Your digital agency launches countless marketing campaigns. They could be for new clients expecting big things, or your favorite customer returning for more. And while every campaign is different, your obligation is the same: to provide the best possible service to the client, and to try to hit their goals.

To provide the best service, you need the right information. It’s hard work, and you need to know that all that work…works.

That’s where monitoring comes in. By tracking social and web conversations during and after the campaign, you’ll see what’s truly effective for you and the client. This lets you make smarter decisions in real-time, and plan better for the next one.

So we’re going to show you how it works. Keep reading to find out how you can monitor marketing campaigns for your clients, and provide an even better service.

You track your clients’ campaigns for the same reason you’d track your own: you need to know that what you’re doing works. In this case, we’re talking about digital campaigns – anything online.

But guess what? Everything’s online these days. Plus, media monitoring covers television and radio, so if you’re a little more old school, that works too.

By actively monitoring your client’s campaign, you’re able to:

1. Measure your performance

That’s what this is all about. You need to know that your marketing strategies work. And more importantly, your clients need to know.

Tracking social and web mentions shows you whether people engage with your content, and how they respond to the message. Tools like sentiment analysis also let you see whether responses are positive or negative overall, so you’ll see quickly how the campaign is received.

The key is to collect all this information in real-time, so you’re able to adjust if necessary.

2. Respond in real time

Real-time monitoring isn’t just useful for feedback on your strategy. It also lets you reach out and respond to social media users live, while the conversation is fresh.

This is incredibly valuable when you’re trying to increase engagement. Monitoring lets you find conversations you’d otherwise have missed, and then actually join them to keep the good vibes coming.

This is also crucial in times of crisis. It may never happen, but if a communications crisis breaks during a campaign, you need to be able to react quickly. Thanks to your diligent monitoring, you’ll know about a crisis before your client does, and can start taking action.

3. Plan better for next time

Monitoring isn’t just valuable during the campaign. Once it’s all over, use all your insightful data to review your gameplan, and figure out what really worked for you and your client?

We’ll go into this in more detail later, but the more you know about your last campaign, the better your next one will be.

Convinced? Good. Now, here’s how to actually track your clients’ campaign, for smarter marketing.

They’ve hired you to help them spread the word online, build buzz on social media, and get some valuable backlinks to their new site.

Here’s how you can monitor your progress.

Before the campaign

While you’re waiting for the fun to begin, it’s a great time to get everything up and running. You need to know what you’re going to monitor, the sources you want to focus on, and what you’re trying to learn.

To do this, you need a plan.

Create a plan

Good monitoring requires a little foresight. Plan out what you’re going to monitor in order to collect all that valuable data.

To do this, think about what’s important to the client. In this case, you care about social media mentions and reach, plus news and blog mentions (for the links). Since it’s a new product, you’ll also want to monitor review sites like Google and Yelp to see what new customers think of it.

This makes choosing the right monitoring tool crucial. Different tools track different sources, and not every tool is the one for you.

Mention, for example, lets you monitor:

Social mentions (including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and many more)
News, blogs, and forums
Major review sites (like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Amazon)
Television and radio in the USA

A good monitoring tool and a great plan are important.

Use clear branding

We’ve said it before, but hashtags are key to easy campaign monitoring. A unique and memorable tag gives social media users something to latch onto, and it’s simple to identify as you track your campaign.

Why?

Media monitoring relies on keywords. Your tool crawls the web and social media looking for a match. So if your hashtag is generic, you don’t know whether it’s really your client’s campaign people are talking about.

And this isn’t just limited to hashtags. You want to give clear and original branding to the entire campaign. If your campaign name isn’t clear and consistent, it’s going to be hard to track.

Brief the client

Good agency/client relationships are built on communication. So make sure your client knows that you’ll be tracking this campaign, and that they can have access to the information.

Most importantly, agree on goals and priorities with the client. Before you launch the campaign, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. This might include increased social exposure for their brand, driving traffic to their site, or even direct sales.

With clear goals, your monitoring becomes more targeted. You know what you’re watching for, and your reports have a clear focus.

Set up monitoring alerts

The final step is the most hands-on. Head into your monitoring tool and create specific alerts for your upcoming campaign.

This requires you to choose keywords to track. These will include your hashtags and brand name, but may also involve specific influencers you’re working with, competitors, and wider industry terms.

You can also narrow your search to specific locations and languages, and choose any specific pages you want to monitor closely.

Set your alerts up in advance of the campaign launch, and get ready to start collecting that sweet, sweet data.

During the campaign

Here’s when all the excitement happens. A flurry of tweets, blog posts, and (hopefully) some good PR. You don’t have the time or energy to manage these manually, so rely on your monitoring tool.

Monitor conversations

If you’ve set up your alerts properly, you should start collecting mentions right away. Your tool will gather them from all over, so you don’t have to worry about searching. You do want to pay attention of what comes in, though.

Now’s the time to establish a system. A way to keep your monitoring inbox neat and tidy. Use folders to separate conversations, and tag mentions to keep them organized.

Create separate folders for good reviews and customer feedback, complaints or negative mentions, press or news mentions, and anything else you want to prioritize. Doing this in the moment makes reporting a breeze later on, and makes sure you’re paying close attention.

For Mention users, this process is even easier. You can tag mentions automatically based on keywords, meaning that mentions file themselves. As the campaign progresses and the mentions pile up, these tags make sorting through them a breeze.

React in real time

For a long time, media monitoring was not a real-time operation. Whether it was Google alerts or a press clippings service, you had to wait until the daily report email to know when your brand had been mentioned.

Modern monitoring tools have changed this. Now, you know instantly when your client has been mentioned, anywhere online. This gives you the opportunity to join and shape conversations as they happen, to either avoid bad publicity or share good reviews.

If your service to the client involves actively managing their social media accounts, these quick reactions are vital. Things move quickly on social, and a situation can arise before you know it.

Whether it’s a complaint about the marketing campaign or the product itself, a quick response can make a huge difference.

Build awareness

So far, you’re tracking mentions of the Bar-b-Cool, replying to questions and comments, and monitoring your campaign. But what if your goal is to increase buzz – to join new conversations, encourage influencers to talk about your client, and to get the name out there.

Try listening to a wider range of subjects than just the brand name. Find people talking about related subjects, and introduce them to your client’s product. These could be blogs about barbecuing, forums discussing new cooking appliances, or just people talking about their favorite Summer activities.

Your monitoring tool will also help you identify influencers as you track your campaign. These might be people already talking about the product, or simply big names in the industry overall. Find them, make a connection, and see if they might be willing to help you spread the word.

Report to clients

With the campaign in full swing, it’s important not to forget about the client. They need to know what people are saying just as soon as you can tell them.

A well-organized monitoring tool makes reporting simple. If you’ve tagged mentions or put them into folders, you’ll be able to export these to share with the client. Mention even lets you automate reports to send to anyone in the world, at whatever frequency you choose.

These can be simple lists of every mention the client has received (with any filters you like), or analytics reports with fancy graphs that prove the value of your hard work.

Plus, good monitoring tools let you assign guest access to your monitoring account. So rather than sending reports to a client, you can let them access their account at any time. And if you don’t want them to see everything Mention lets you choose the alerts they have access to.

Whether you send reports or let the client see things for themselves, this saves an immense amount of time you’d normally spend making spreadsheets.

After the campaign

At this point, much of the excitement is over. But that doesn’t mean the job is done.

Now’s the time to evaluate your performance – to see which of your tactics were the most effective, and which didn’t really move the needle. It’s also time to prepare a final report for the client, and it needs to make a great impression.

So where do you start with your campaign recap?

See how far the campaign spread

The first thing you need to do is take a step back, and try to look at your campaign as a whole. The idea is to find the strategies that really worked for you.

So let’s say you enlisted the help of three influencers. These industry insiders each wrote a blog post about the Bar-b-Cool. You want to know which did the best job and generated the most conversations.

A metric like “spread” is perfect for this. It shows you every conversation that comes as a result of a single mention:

You’ll be able to compare each of your three influencers to see for sure which wrote the most impactful blog post. Then, you can compare these with other mentions (social media, news articles, forums), and see whether influencer marketing was actually an effective strategy in this case.

Next time you’re planning a similar product campaign like Bar-b-Cool’s you’ll have evidence of which strategies work best.

Analyze your key metrics

Monitoring can help you assess the most effective parts of your campaign, to make better decisions for next time. Now that the campaign is over, this is the perfect time!

Monitoring tools let you do this for a few metrics that matter to your clients.

Mentions

It seems basic, but you can learn from your mentions. For instance, a sudden spike in mentions might show you a specific strategy that really worked:

This becomes even more interesting when you compare volume on different sources, such as social networks. You may discover that a network like Instagram was more effective than expected.

Reach

Reach shows you how many people have potentially seen your campaign. You can break this down by date, platform, or use your tags to compare different parts of your campaign.

For example, your campaign may have been made up of PR outreach, influencer marketing, and social media. Using your tags, you can compare the reach of each part of the campaign.

You can then devote more resources to that part of the strategy next time around.

Sentiment

Good monitoring tools include built-in sentiment analysis. This shows you whether mentions were positive, negative, or neutral.

If your client is launching a new product – as in this case – you’ll know quickly what people think of it and be able to report back.

Report to clients

As always, this information can all be fed back to clients. This might be to show them what people think of their new product, using metrics like sentiment. More importantly, it gives you the chance to prove your value to them.

Again, good reporting tools make this simple. Put together a final report showing them how the campaign performed, which tactics generated the most interest, and most importantly, how your efforts paid off for them.

What are the 5 Key Performance Indicators?

In the fitness studio industry, there are at least a dozen valuable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to consider. We’ve selected the top 5 based on the Association of Fitness Studios (AFS) research, which is a valuable resource to gain a full understanding of the flow of your business.

1. Revenue per client/member (RPC)

The most common, and probably the easiest KPI to track is Revenue Per Client – a measure of productivity. A simple calculation (annual revenue divided by number of clients).

For example, you generate $300,000 annually and you have 300 clients, then your RPC is $1,000, roughly the industry average. (That’s right. The average client is worth $1,000 per year!)

Besides access to classes and/or membership dues, what else can you make available for sale to your clients? What do they want? What would be a complementary product or service that would enhance enjoyment without seeming too aggressive?

2. Average Class Attendance (ACA)

Another popular KPI, not surprisingly, is Average Class Attendance (ACA). If classes are full or nearly so, it indicates a highly desired class, and theoretically, a profitable class.

At the other end of the spectrum, some classes are not quite as full. It’s incumbent on the owner to find out why; often an elusive answer. It’s key to know the difference between:

·A bad class

·A bad instructor

·A bad day or time

3. Client Retention Rate (CRR)

Retention – the percentage of clients you retain – is critical to long-term profitability. In many ways, it’s the most important KPI of all because it measures how well you’re delivering on your brand promise.

Typical CRR for the studio industry is roughly 72%. So, what do you do to increase that number?

Focus on marketing strategies, tactics, messaging, time and expenditure along with ongoing sales efforts. Retain your clients by:

·Deliver what you promised.

·Make sure those who work in your studio (whether employee or independent contractor) have embraced your vision.

·Understand why clients are leaving. Do exit interviews. Let them know you value their opinion.

4. Profit Margin (PM)

If it costs you more to generate the revenue than the revenue you generate – that’s a negative PM and your business is not long for this world. That is, unless you’re incredibly well financed and have deep pockets.

If not, turn your attention to where and how you’re spending your money. Where is your money going? Which expenses are out of control? Which are necessary expenditures and which are not? Which expenses help generate revenue?

And don’t overlook the revenue side of the coin. Are you charging enough for this or for that? Does your pricing model need revision? Are your programs stale?

5. Average Daily Attendance (ADA)

A simple KPI but one that can get blurry. Is your studio full of Class Passers who pay next to nothing and have no intention of ever joining your studio or paying full price for a class? Good for Average Daily Attendance, terrible for Profit Margin or Client Retention Rate.

There are lots of methods to achieve your ADA goal. Give away free promo items, run special promotions, bring a friend, special this or that are all ideas. But be careful. While there’s validity to ADA as a marketing strategy, make sure there’s a sales acquisition strategy to support it.

Try this

Write down on a piece of paper every aspect of your business – from marketing to recording keeping, order supplies – anything you can think of.

Now write down the number “1” next to each. On the other side of the paper, the number “10.” Go through each one and grade yourself 1-10, with 10 being awesome and 1 being needs improvement.

Those that rank 6-10, leave alone. Those from 4-6, same thing (for now). Focus on those that are 1-3 and determine how you can get better there. Chances are, if those areas are suffering then other areas of your business are being affected as well.

Conclusion

Measuring the success of your campaign is crucial for a number of reasons, and this article has provided the crucial steps required to help you measure your campaign success. Implementing them should be your next step.