Marketers of today are aware that their methods for gauging, deciphering, and communicating the effectiveness of their initiatives must change over time.
Marketers now need to assess and analyze campaigns in a more methodical way rather than simply reviewing post-campaign reports and opinions on what could have been done better.
There is, however, one issue. Less than a third of marketers, according to Forrester, are able to fully adhere to a mature marketing assessment practice.
A well-known adage in the field of data science is “Garbage in, garbage out.” In other words, your thoughts will be poor if your data and analytical skills aren’t strong enough.
The outlook is clear: marketers must advance their data-driven projects more quickly or they run the risk of missing out on chances to engage with their target audience.
Making sure you choose high-value, people-oriented metrics and then supporting those metrics with high-quality data are two ways to make significant progress.
Let’s examine how your company can choose and promote the appropriate marketing metrics to improve your brand’s marketing success.
Related Reading: Privacy-First Marketing For The Customer-Centric World
Can You Gauge Your Brand’s Marketing Success?
It’s critical to define success before choosing useful measures and gathering supporting information. Is the goal to increase short-term sales or company equity? Are there any income targets that must be reached?
Spend some time considering this because something as straightforward as “improve the bottom line” can be so ambiguous that it sends teams awry.
Once you have a vision for success, check in with the executive team to make sure your goals are in sync. You’re prepared to move forward once you’ve made sure that everyone in your company is on the same page.
Measure Marketing Success from the Consumer’s Perspective
Your business strategy should be centered on your customers, and marketing teams in particular need to make sure they’re keeping a constant pulse on prospective customers.
You can better grasp how the market views both your brand and your product by putting the needs of the customer first.
With 84 percent of marketers agreeing that customer expectations will make person-level data a crucial capability before 2023, many marketers are starting to understand this.
This is particularly crucial because contemporary consumers are still interacting with campaigns through various channels.
Imagine, for example, that a team of automotive marketers discovered that a startling amount of leads are being sent to nearby dealerships by pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on Google.
They ought to take a step back and consider which touchpoints make up the normal customer journey before pouring more money into the campaign.
PPC ads are probably the last touchpoint in their sales funnel because, more often than not, customers engage with brands across a variety of touchpoints and platforms before expressing any interest in making a purchase.
They might not be able to comprehend how brand-related touchpoints affect sales if they did not properly track brand metrics.
To choose the appropriate metrics, it’s critical to comprehend how each of these touchpoints interacts with the others from the viewpoint of the consumer. You’ll lose out on important nurturing activities if you don’t.
Related Reading: Brand Value Tracking: Can A Marketing Services Provider Help?
Choose Important Metrics that Measure Marketing Impact
The job of assessing the effectiveness of marketing has never been simple, and it is becoming more challenging as a result of the growing variety of marketing channels and the increased focus on consumer data privacy.
So how should the success of an effort be evaluated?
First, marketers need to stay away from vanity measures that make them feel good.
Reporting that “web traffic increased by 20%” or “we gained 100 new followers” may sound like proof of achievement, but it is challenging to connect these metrics to sales and brand performance, particularly when they are reported across multiple campaigns.
It’s crucial to commence with metrics that are focused on the customer, with performance metrics serving as a backup. Think about these measurements as a place to start:
Repeat purchase rate
This customer-focused measure will show you how devoted your customers are and can be applied to sales forecasting.
Customer lifetime value
Each customer will make a distinct financial contribution to your business over the course of their relationship with your brand. The amount they will spend in the upcoming years is predicted by this measure.
Churn rate
This statistic will reveal more details about when and why customers abandon your sales funnel. Additionally, it will shed light on the initiatives that increase or decrease customer churn.
The speed at which your clients are advancing through the sales funnel is known as funnel velocity. If your funnel velocity is greater, you won’t need as many touchpoints to convert a prospect into a transaction.
Sales growth
Sales growth looks at the direction your sales are taking, which can be used to predict the ROI of a campaign.
Your return on marketing investment, or ROMI, is calculated by dividing your total income by your total marketing expenditure. This can be applied as a basis for scaling an effective campaign or as a way to measure the success of campaigns.
Contextualize the metrics you’ve chosen to monitor into marketing KPIs, also referred to as key performance indicators. Remember that KPIs must be quantifiable, time-limited, and connected to an ongoing effort.
Related Reading: B2B Digital Advertising – How To Strategize For Enhanced Growth?
Improving Brand’s Marketing Success By Soliciting Data from Outside of Marketing
Almost every department in your company is constantly using and creating useful data, so marketing doesn’t live in a vacuum.
Your company probably collaborates with other companies or agencies, which opens up a whole new world of opportunities for data gathering.
Smart analysts are aware that departmental or cross-organizational collaborations can add a completely new dimension to evaluating the performance of a campaign.
Consider an automaker that advertised a special offer for trade-ins and saw a significant increase in the number of leads it generated for its stores. This might be fantastic news for their marketing department.
The marketing team must request access to both qualitative and quantitative data from the sales teams at the dealerships because leads do not generate income on their own.
When compared to earlier campaigns, you might find that very few of the leads are actually converting, which is a disappointing sign that the campaign wasn’t as successful as it seemed.
When marketers realized their campaign wasn’t successful, they could work with an information partner to contextualize the results and collect more information for subsequent campaigns.
For instance, they might collaborate with a financial organization to determine whether long-term trends in consumer spending on cars exist or to identify the interest rates that consumers are most likely to accept during a negotiation.
This additional information might be all that the marketing team requires to find new measures and transform an unsuccessful campaign into a resounding success.
In closing
It’s critical to think outside the box when choosing which metrics matter and which datasets can support those metrics if you want to analyze the effect of your marketing.
This is often simpler said than done, though. According to research, 70% of marketers want to increase their current data skills, but 72% are having trouble locating the tools needed to develop a cohesive marketing strategy to increase your brand’s marketing success.
Marketers need a performance measurement system that can gather and examine all of this data in one location before they can look at data, metrics, and KPIs holistically.
A cookie-free future seems all but inevitable in a world where change is the only constant, so the answer must be adaptable. Teams must be prepared to change their measurement strategies immediately.
Marketers will find it much simpler to interact with their customers and improve ROI once they have the technology, knowledge, and motivation necessary to choose the most impactful metrics.
