Good marketing requires investing time and resources, and just like with any investment, it’s essential to track how your marketing efforts are performing. But what metrics should you look at when it comes time to analyze your marketing? Let’s look at how to review your performance and set yourself up for marketing success.
Before starting any marketing campaign, it’s important to establish clear goals to help guide your strategy. Then, once you’ve started your marketing campaign, you can measure whether you’re meeting those goals and make adjustments as necessary.
Let’s consider a hypothetical marketing scenario with two main goals:
● Attract more prospects to your website
○ Tactics: Social media, email, online ads
● Get more Millennial clients
○ Tactics: Video posts, webinars, email
You'll need data to determine whether your marketing campaign is working. For social media and online ads, there are two main metrics to analyze:
● Impressions: the number of times the content was viewed
● Engagements: the number of actions — likes, comments, and shares — that people took with the content
For email marketing, you’ll mostly be looking at these two metrics:
● Open rate: percentage of recipients who opened the email
● Click-through-rate: percentage of recipients who not only opened the email but also clicked at least once on the content
While it might be tempting to analyze each email or social media post individually, it’s best to wait until you have a range of data points so that you can track success over time. We recommend analyzing your marketing metrics roughly every quarter.
How to Spot Patterns in Your Marketing
Now that you’ve accumulated quantifiable metrics for your marketing efforts, you can begin to sift through the data for clear lessons. Try to identify the best-performing posts or emails based on the metrics you’ve established, and ask yourself the following question: What patterns do you see?
Here are some prompts that might help answer that question:
● Are the best-performing social media posts using video or photos?
● Are certain types of subject lines leading to a higher open rate?
● Do posts from a certain time of day receive a better response?
● Do visitors to your website come to certain pages more than others?
Once you’ve begun to analyze your marketing efforts, the process becomes fairly simple: Do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. The truth is, it’s not much more complicated than that! You’ve already done the hard work of gathering data and spotting patterns. Now, you simply have to make the right changes.
After that, the hard work begins again: monitoring the changes to make sure the changes are successful. Audience habits are constantly shifting, and it’s essential to have the flexibility to respond to them, both with the types of content you’re delivering and how you’re delivering it. The reality is that the work of successful marketing never stops, but with these techniques, you can set your team up for repeatable, long-term success.