How do you know if your business is successful? Do you know if your marketing efforts are reaching your target audience and resonating with them? By setting business goals aligned with your business objectives, you have something to work towards. Data gives you the insights to see if your marketing strategy is on the right track or if it needs adjusting.
Here, you’ll discover how to measure your marketing plans to ensure you’re using data-driven decision-making for your business. And ultimately, you’ll make better marketing campaigns and achieve the results you need.
What is a Marketing Measurement Plan?
First things first, what is a marketing measurement plan? Basically, it’s a way of ensuring that your marketing strategies are effective. A measurement plan details your objectives and tracks the metrics to measure marketing performance. It underpins your whole marketing strategy and helps you to focus on the right areas.
Measurement plans provide a framework that will help you implement and measure results. A clearly defined measurement strategy and plan with specific targets provides a roadmap for your marketing team.
Analysing data relating to your marketing initiatives shows you clearly what’s working and what isn’t. Measuring marketing effectiveness ultimately ensures a higher return on investment (ROI).
What Data Should You Collect and Why?
The key performance indicators (KPIs) that you choose to measure need to reflect your business strategy, aims and intended outcomes. For marketing performance measurement, it’s essential to identify and track key metrics and KPIs. Set benchmarks for marketing channels and evaluate them regularly to measure their success.
Ensure your business has the best data sources and analytics tools to provide your marketing team with the information they need to inform their decision-making. It’ll empower your team as well as improving their marketing performance and results.
Key marketing metrics to measure and review:
Website performance – page views, unique users, engagement levels can all be tracked using Google analytics or other digital analytics platforms to show audience behaviour and engagement online. This allows for regular platform optimisation.
Conversion rates – show the effectiveness of a call to action. Has a new user become a customer? Has a new customer made a purchase or interaction with your team? If not, why not?
Social media metrics – likes, shares and comments all show audience engagement with your brand and its reach and visibility.
Email marketing – your CRM will detail open rates, click through rates and bounce rates to inform your performance analysis.
Lead generation – the customer journey shows the effectiveness of your sales funnel and which marketing initiatives are resulting in new leads.
Customer acquisition cost – measuring how much it costs to acquire a new customer and to retain them.
Retention rates – is your marketing generating customer loyalty? If your customers aren’t sticking around, you need to understand the reason.
Return on investment – determine the profitability of your marketing efforts.
Why are Marketing Metrics Important?
Ultimately, having this data at your fingertips gives you actionable insights. It gives you the information you need to improve and adjust your marketing efforts.
Clearly defined KPIs ensure accountability within a team. It encourages them to strive for continuous improvement – a cycle where you implement a marketing initiative, measure performance, adjust according to data and then review again.
It becomes easier to identify areas for cost savings. Resources can be allocated to where they’re needed most. Overall, you’re operating in a more efficient and cost effective way.
You’ll understand your target audience better, making it easier to tailor your messaging and marketing initiatives to engage with them.
Plus, you’ll be operating in a data-driven environment, relying on fact rather than instinct. Marketing performance can be reported back to stakeholders with confidence.
How To Measure the Effectiveness of a Marketing Campaign
There are five important steps to implement in order to measure marketing effectiveness. Follow this step-by-step guide to establish your marketing measurement plan.
Step 1: Set Your Objectives
Think about the purpose of your marketing initiative, be that your website, social media channels or an offline campaign. If your website is based on e-commerce, then sales will be its primary purpose. Social media channels may be about brand visibility or customer referrals. What’s the primary objective of this marketing effort?
Step 2: Define Your KPIs
How will you achieve the objective that you set in step one? Define a series of specific KPIs that will contribute to reaching that specific goal. These need to be in line with overall business objectives to ensure the whole organisation is working towards the same goals.
For example, if your goal is to acquire new customers then you can set a benchmark of target page views or customer registrations on your website.
Step 3: Collect Data Sources
How will you measure marketing effectiveness? Establish the data sources that you need to gather. Put the right data analytics platforms in place. Aggregate first-party data from your direct customer relationships along with cross-platform tools.
Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager may be all the tools you need to gather intelligent data insights and tracking. However, you may need more sophisticated data analytics platforms to assess other marketing touchpoints and initiatives. This will involve strategic investment by the business to provide the marketing team with the appropriate tools.
Step 4: Implement Your Measurement Plan
Put the right technical tools and tracking in place to ensure you get the flow of data that you need. Make sure the right people have access to the right data. Which members of your marketing team need to monitor which pieces of information?
You may need to hold training workshops or webinars at this stage to ensure your team is equipped with the knowledge to assess and interpret the data.
Step 5: Review and Report
It’s important to be clear about expectations. Key stakeholders may want a monthly report on performance for example. Define a clear reporting process to ensure timely information reaches the best people to aid their decision-making. Plus, this data-driven information needs to influence continuous improvement and adjustment of strategies and marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
The days of relying on gut instincts and assumed knowledge are gone. With access to numerous data sources, businesses need to rely on facts and analytics.
A marketing measurement plan lays out specific goals, KPIs and expectations for your business. Marketing teams are able to attribute results to specific marketing efforts through data analysis. It’s a process to align your whole business, so stakeholder objectives inform marketing strategy and action plans.
Overall, a measurement plan is a powerful tool for using actionable insights to drive marketing performance and ensure business success.
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