Measure the effectiveness of your marketing

By Nancy Garberson / Guest Column

With marketing resources much more fragmented than ever before across multiple channels, measuring the effectiveness of a specific marketing campaign is essential, but it can be difficult to design and implement on your own.

When teaching my class at Mount Mercy University about marketing measurement, we talk about how every aspect must be considered, starting at the day of planning. Every facet of your marketing campaign plan needs to have a measurement or metrics procedure built into it. Without a goal and measurement plan in place, you can’t determine success. If you monitor and regulate the evolvement, and correct at appropriate times, you can achieve your goal.

If you wait until the campaign is finished, you can’t make changes along the way, and adjusting for a successful outcome could be critical. It’s an overwhelming task, especially when you’re busy with other parts of your business. Pick a few key measures for both the product and the brand, and monitor them. Pick the ones most tied to your organization’s success, so you know they are driving the business.

Measuring metrics
The easiest metric is sales. Did the campaign increase sales of the specific product or service? It’s important to not only set your sales forecast in advance, but to monitor the key elements that affect your forecast along the way. You may also want to measure customer satisfaction of the characteristics of your product, to see if an upgrade might be needed.

Measuring your brand
Lots of companies track sales and think that’s enough, but outlooks and awareness about the brand and what it has to offer impact your success. You may know how well your product is selling, but if you don’t know how the brand is delivering on its promise then you need to be digging to find out.

A few ways to measure:

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is an instrument that fits in the “click analysis” grouping. It’s a good way to get an overall understanding of traffic flow, demographics and attainment. It has evolved a lot since it was first introduced, for example, you can set up events and track objectives.

Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg is a tool to track how people observe your website, how they scroll and what activities they are drawn to. You can set up numerous pages on your website and see how consumers engage with them.

Kissmetrics: Kissmetrics and Mixpanel help you develop retention analysis.

Optimizely: Testing and improving your path to growth is a big share of being a marketer. It helps you calculate the statistical significance of the results. It means you can rapidly adapt to the winning results and develop them later. Another similar tool is Unbounce, which is designed to test and create new landing pages to test variations of the existing page.

Intercom: Using segments can quickly lend understanding into a product’s most dynamic users, allowing marketers to target various users differently. You can test different messages, and send messages through an in-app messenger or by email.

Qualaroo: On-site surveys are a way to target users and get their immediate feedback. Qualaroo has non-intrusive surveys, in which you can ask users questions – just like the HyVee check-out person does when you are leaving, “did you find everything you wanted?” You can target returning visitors, visitors who remained on a page after multiple seconds and visitors who met other important criteria.

UserTesting: Qualitative feedback is usually accomplished with focus groups, which takes time and energy to arrange. With UserTesting, you can see how your customers are using and understanding your site within just a few hours. It helps you identify and improve upon user experience and usability.

Buffer: Buffer is for your social media management breakdown. You can see how your posts perform, so you can improve your content. They have retention reports where you can view retention around different segments.

Custora: Custora is for understanding your customer lifecycle value. If they specifically want certain products or services, you can market to them differently, increasing their lifetime value to your organization. They have predictive segmentation patterns so you can recognize quickly which customers have the most value.

There are so many analytical tools available on the Internet and apps that can help you in business each and every day. Take a look around to see what’s out there – the more information you have about reaching your goals, the better.

Nancy Garberson is the owner of Marketing & Strategic Communication Strategies Inc., in Cedar Rapids, and an adjunct professor at Mt. Mercy University, teaching managerial marketing in its MBA and Master of Strategic Leadership programs.