How to Measure Your Company’s Marketing Performance

As the digital age ushered in the various social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and Google, among many others, it paved the way for increasingly sophisticated metrics and analytics for marketing campaigns. Gone were the days when a single ad for a massive event like the Superbowl will bring no such data as the length of time that an ordinary person engaged with the ad, nor if it resulted directly in sales revenue for the business who run it.

Today, digital marketing will provide you with readily accessible data for keeping track of the ROI in all of your campaigns as long as you know how to manage your information. Now, the more significant challenge compared to the lack of relevant data before is to make sense of the extensive metrics available, how to gain access to them, and which to bring your attention to. 

It’s quite essential to measure your company’s performance to ensure that you’re spending where you should. Every effort towards marketing must pay off and translate to a growing market share and accomplishment of company goals. Part of assessing marketing performance is measuring output accurately, or else you have no way of knowing which campaigns work and which ones don’t.

With that said, let’s have a look at some of the most excellent ways to evaluate your marketing programs to see which best contributes to your company’s bottom line.

How to set marketing performance metrics 

Set Goals

To be effectively reached, marketing goals must be crystal clear and follow the SMART requirements that most businesses adhere to today. SMART is an acronym for specific and measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound as most are familiar with. These are vital to any marketing campaign’s success since you cannot monitor any effort’s performance without these concrete objectives.

To give you an idea of how a SMART goal looks like, some examples are in order. For SEO, if you shell out $25,000 to do SEO optimization for your webpage, you can set 6 months as a reasonable period to target a 30% increase in traffic. For your email marketing, you may want to achieve 10,000 additional subscribers, a 10% uptick in your conversion rate, a 20% churn rate decrease, or hit the 50,000 mark for your number of subscribers over six months. Your goals will vary depending on your unique business needs and preferences.

Setting the SMART goals for your company will be influenced heavily by results or how valuable a specific marketing effort is in the long haul. If it translates to revenues, then it is worth investing in, and the business will do well in keeping at it as long as it works to its advantage.

Set Limits

Quantifying results will only add value to the business if it is relevant to a specific period. Though information for an entire year is more useful than one from a week or even a month, if you have your goals set, you can measure your results based on the length of time involved. These differ depending on the season, the economic landscape, and other uncontrollable variables that affect your marketing output. One tip for lean months is to invest heavily in advertising to spur consumption and compensate for some drop in sales.  

Set up a monitoring system

It’s challenging to track all metrics for every marketing effort, but if a system is in place to try and accomplish such, it will help a great deal in evaluating marketing performance. Though it may seem tedious, examining every individual digital marketing method will be most valuable since you will know which are truly helpful for your company and which you can keep doing to milk it for maximum benefits.

Check out some models of marketing methods that you can monitor for results.

Social Media

On these platforms, you can look at some metrics, including the number of likes, new followers, popular posts, and overall engagement, among others. These may not directly positively impact your ROI, but they will surely drive traffic onto your website.

How are these measured, especially when you have posts across multiple platforms? The good news is that most of these provide you their analytics for free in exchange for keeping your account with them and spurring activity. They help you monitor leads, conversions and even has a calculator for customer lifetime value, costs for new leads, and ROI.

Remember that peoples’ engagement via these outlets is volatile. Some of your ads may not be so well received, while others may go viral unexpectedly. The key is to scrutinize the ones that engage people in volumes and figure out what worked to replicate it for future ads. 

Today, social media platforms are undeniably the best outlets for attracting new customers, boosting your public relations, and forging relationships with your clients.

SEO

For your SEO, you must look at your ranking based on keywords. The goal is to rank higher than most websites on Google search so people will be drawn to your page. Apart from the sheer number of traffic, however, you have to look at its quality. Are those who visit your page staying and navigating through your website? The most common metric is to track if users are engaged for greater than 20 seconds; otherwise, you may need to review your keywords. 

Email Marketing

Though considered old school, email campaigns are still vital in this day and age. Today, you can take advantage of some deployment software to track marketing results based on the number of subscribers you have on your list. At times, the growth of your email list correlates with the increase in your sales. 

Click-through rates may also be monitored based on industry standards but a reasonable rate to aim at is 2% with an open rate of 20%. MailChimp is an automation software that you can employ to provide analytics to your email marketing programs. Split testing may be used to know which content works best for your company if you have low clicks and opens. 

One factor that you can also look at is conversion rates. No matter how massive your email list is, if they don’t translate into sales, then the number is useless. MailChimp can help in this aspect, which you can link with your Google Analytics to figure out how many of your subscribers become your customers.  

Evaluating your marketing performance

It’s all about the traffic

Traffic can tell you a lot about the success of your marketing efforts. If search engine results drive half of your website traffic, then it’s proof that your SEO strategy is working. Google Analytics can show you these numbers for every page on your website.

Campaign traffic

Marketing campaigns allow your target customers to interact with your brand on a sustained basis, and you can check the number of people who are actively engaged throughout the program as they visit your website, navigate through it and click your calls to action.

Referral traffic

This traffic comes from everywhere else apart from the search engine, perhaps from your social media ads and other inbound links. Google Analytics and adding bit.ly links to your posts give information on where precisely the referral traffic comes from. 

Conversions/Sales

Ultimately, what any company wants is for all the variables to come together and produce revenue. New customers drawn to the brand and who bought into your services and products are those that matter most. Every marketing effort must be measured against how much it contributed to increased conversions and actual sales.

However, this doesn’t mean that other methods that don’t instantly translate to sales are not helpful. Some may take time to build up and impact your revenues. To know which yield the most significant ROI, extensive analysis may be required.

Customer Lifetime Value

Every marketing cost to attract new customers may be evaluated if they generate sales for the company. By reviewing your marketing performance, you will know which advertising methods are effective in bringing in revenues. However, customers also have worth long in the future if you are successful in keeping them your clients. Businesses keep the customer lifetime value in check to make sure that existing clients make lifetime purchases.

Final words

Digital marketing is the way to go at this particular time in our history when most people are glued to their devices, consuming as much content as they can on a single day. Companies that invest their effort, energy, time, and money in building up their brand through digital means will surely reap the countless benefits. They will enjoy the access to analytics information that helps drive their marketing programs in the right direction. 

As such, it is vital to evaluate your marketing performance to make sure that every penny counts towards the accomplishment of your goals. Are your outcomes meeting your set objectives? Does your ROI satisfy your company targets? Is your investment in a particular marketing method worth it? It is crucial to continually assess how you’re doing in your campaigns so you can make adjustments and re-strategize in this fast-paced and fiercely competitive field of marketing.