How to measure marketing campaign success

Measurement and statistics are a key way to analyze if something is working for your business, and marketing is no exception but if you are wondering how to measure marketing campaign success, you are not alone. Unlike many areas of business, things can be subject to interpretation – a good campaign can fail to gain traction and on occasion, a lesser campaign will run and run providing a steady influx of new customers.

Your marketing campaign success may be easy to measure – you may see sales spike using a discount code promoted in your campaign for instance – but often it is more useful to use KPIs that will give you intel on what exactly worked and allow you to reverse engineer why.

Step 1 – Set goals and timelines

If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, you will not be able to measure the success of your marketing campaign. Make sure you document the specific aims of the campaign e.g. 100 newsletter signups or 50 new customer purchases and also the timeline you hope to achieve it in. As with so many projects, a clear plan is the key to success.

Step 2 – Set KPIs

This is where many businesses that are new to marketing fall short. It is not enough to set your campaign running and hope to make sense of the results later. Figure out what your campaign is targeting and make sure your campaign uses CTAs (call to action) that are relevant. You can spend countless dollars marketing your brand but if you don’t have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve you are unlikely to reap any benefits.

Some Possible KPIs

• Brand awareness – Increase impressions, click-through rate, page views, shares, website traffic, newsletter signups etc.
• Engagement – Increase traffic, leads, engagement on social channels, time visiting your site etc.
• Post-sales – Increase repeat purchases/renewals, lower returns rate, increase referral rate, gain positive reviews
• Financial – Return on investment (cost per click ads vs increased sales), increase conversion rate, increase customer lifetime value

Step 3 – Set up your tracking

Once you have your KPIs clearly defined, the next step to measure your marketing campaign success is to set up the relevant tracking. Use UTMs to track where leads have come from, install Facebook Pixel on your website or use a unique discount or referral code.

Step 4 – Analyze your data

It may seem obvious but once you have set up your methods for tracking your data, make sure to check in and analyze the data on a regular basis. If you are running a long campaign, checking in once a week or once a month (depending on the specifics) will help you compare your progress to previous periods and/or previous campaigns.

How to measure a marketing campaign’s success

Although you will have some key aims for your marketing campaign it is worth remembering that marketing is an art. Your KPIs will show you the hard figures and hopefully, you will see improvements in the areas you are looking for, but it is worth looking at all the data points available. You may find your campaign has been successful in ways you haven’t expected. Even if your preferred KPIs haven’t improved as you would have hoped, the marketing campaign can be deemed successful if it has benefited your business is other ways. Maybe your SEO ranking has improved, maybe you have brought a new demographic to your site etc. It is also possible that the effects are slow to be realized but will be noticeable over a year or more. This can happen if your campaign has increased the number of people entering a sales funnel or the number of lead magnets downloaded.

Over time, these people may engage with your brand further, particularly if you run follow-up campaigns, and eventually, become valued customers.

Lessons to be learnt

Thomas Edison once said “I didn’t fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work”. Marketing campaign success often follows a similar path. Every campaign you run is an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t for your business. It provides valuable information that allows you to pivot your future campaigns and learn more about your customers.

Want a Hand?

Of course, if you are new to running a marketing campaign there is also a learning curve. If you want to take advantage of our experience and give your campaign the best chance of gaining traction straight out of the gate, we are happy to help.

Cyber PR Army Solutions Inc.. Understand where you want to be, and we’ll help you get there.