Spending time and money on marketing doesn’t necessarily mean your business is going to grow in proportion to the effort. When creating a campaign, you need to set a budget and then determine your message and the best channels to choose. Depending on your products and target customers, focusing on one channel may indeed be the best approach for your business, but it is important that your campaign is still planned and executed well so you have the best chance of success. I like to remind my clients of the importance of pre-determining your success metrics, so you can focus on outcomes rather than the less important aspects that distract you from achieving a campaign’s objective.
Defining success
In order to measure the success of any campaign marketing activity, you need to decide what success looks like and ensure that your efforts are going to achieve your intended goals. I’ve included a range of potential metrics that you can set before your campaign goes into market.
Click through rate (CTR)
This metric determines the number of people who click on your ad taking them to the page you’ve set up for the campaign. While it tells you how much interest your ad is generating, you have to take care with this metric because it can be misleading. Just because people click on the ad doesn’t mean you’ve created a successful campaign. There are loads more steps to ensure you’ve achieved success.
Website visits
Most companies are aware of the average number of visits to their website and if you have a campaign in market, it is likely that you will see a spike during this time, especially if you’re going beyond your existing customer base. While website visits are important, the other metrics you need to consider is the time visitors are spending on your page, whether they are new or returning visitors and whether they navigate elsewhere. These measurements will help determine the strength and effectiveness of your website messaging and potentially how easy it is to navigate your site so they can find the information they need to buy from you.
customer enquiries
While you can specify how you want potential customers to contact you, they don’t always follow the channel you’ve chosen, especially if it doesn’t suit them. While this can be annoying, measuring the additional enquiries, whether they be by phone, social or email can also provide great insight into your target market. It might suit you to send them to your call centre, but it might not suit your customers. Heed their response or lack thereof and change your channel if required. If they want to interact through social media, make sure you have informed people monitoring and responding on your social pages. You can’t dictate to your customers, you have to respond to their requirements.
lead generation
Measuring leads that your campaign generates is where the rubber hits the road. Before you start a campaign, you have to determine how you want to generate leads and or make direct sales. B2B companies may have software like LeadLander or Leedfeeder, that provides the name of the company that a visitor works for, however, unless that person has visited your site before, it’s unlikely to tell you the name or contact details of the particular visitor to your page. I’ve worked with a lot of companies who place far too much emphasis on this kind of software and get frustrated when their sales people can’t convert on this metric. Although you know someone working for a target customer has visited your site, if they are a large customer, you can waste a lot of time trying to find who that person is and you’ll probably never be successful. I would suggest spending more time planning a strong call to action so you are encouraging all visitors to contact you about buying from you. So when you’re deciding your success metrics, you’ll want to include phone calls, contact forms, emails sent and any other actions you’ve asked your target customers to take. And always ensure you have people ready to action these leads. There is NOTHING WORSE than leads that do not get followed up. I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of thousands on campaigns but have not followed up the leads generated. I’ve also seen companies providing a phone number as their call to action but not having that number staffed with people skilled in sales support who have been briefed well about the campaign and its objectives. This is such a waste of time and money!
conversions
It’s really important that you measure your lead conversion rate because it can tell you so much information about the effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams. If you want to know how to calculate this rate, read my blog, How to measure your lead conversion rate. You want this rate to be high and you want to know what happened to every lead that didn’t get converted because over time you’ll see patterns emerging that are going to provide great insight about your product, your people and your process for making a sale. If you’re not converting sales it could be for a whole range of reasons but ensure you explore each and every one, and make changes where you can to increase that conversion rate. No one wants to waste resources creating a campaign, only to have a sale fall over at the last minute because of something that could have been fixed.
You might also want to take a look at your sales lead time and the time taken to move through your sales funnel, because if you can reduce this, you’ll save a lot of money in additional sales and marketing efforts. Keeping your clients engaged takes money, time and energy so reducing this metric will save you in the short and long run.
evaluating your campaign’s success
It’s not possible to foresee exactly how successful, or unsuccessful, your campaign will be, so I’d urge you to always be conservative in your initial goals and then over time you can create benchmarks for the results you are likely to achieve. At a campaign’s end you need to do a thorough assessment on your return on investment (ROI) achieved to help you plan your next activity and hopefully improve your results.
Rhonda Locke is a highly experienced marketer, a customer, product and brand champion, and is the Founder and Director of Unlocke Creative.