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Measuring success – how to spend wisely

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Campaigns

The reviewing and analysing of results is important whatever you do. Whether you’re a 100 metre runner, a school teacher or a marketing manager you need to know what you have achieved and how you have achieved it. How can you improve if you don’t know what you’ve done and how you’ve done it?

Reviewing results can come in many different forms. Whether it is internal metrics of year-on-year growth, the bench-marking of a particular measurement against an industry average or the comparison of your business to that of your competitors.

When it comes to marketing campaigns, having a diverse set of target metrics can help focus and balance an initiative. The more metrics that your business uses, the more insight can be gained on channel effectiveness and which mediums really deliver.

So, what does this all mean for you and what do we think about measuring at ib3? Hopefully this will explain a little more…

Clarity Of Objectives

Valuable insight can only be gathered when the objectives are clear. Without clear objectives, how are you supposed to be able to attribute a target to them? Being SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound) is vital. I know that this is a basic fundamental to many businesses, but it is simple elements such as this that are the foundations of any worthwhile analysis. The more specific and detailed the objectives, the stronger the foundations. Objectives can be monetary, they can be based on recognition, impressions, the number of downloads or sign ups, plus many more.

We want to deliver x number of leads by the end of y, equating to at least £z. We want to focus on a-b year olds within the c area of the UK. The more detail, the better. Break down what you want to achieve.

Quality Of Data

Before you begin looking at what values that you want to track, it’s extremely important that you know what data is available to you and how reliable it is. Do not place importance on metrics when the source is slightly dubious. Be confident that the data that you are viewing is correct, up to date and recognised as a source used within your industry. Never assume what you’re looking at is 100% fact, take time to check. For a lot of data, you may be able to use internal metrics or systems like Google Analytics and Google Adwords, but when you start looking at market share or market value data, take your time.

Assigning A Value And Measurement

Once you have your objectives, you need to pick your measurements. As I’ve mentioned, they may be monetary, they may not. For example, market share could be a real focus for your business. You may believe that a brand awareness campaign is best measure by looking at market share pre-campaign and then post. Again, be specific, is it a four week read of data, is it twelve months? What share would be successful, 12%, 12.2% or 12.23%? It could be that you assign a number of values to success. Market share, sales volume and brochure downloads. Create a balance and gain alignment from all stakeholders to ensure that campaigns can be tracked as thoroughly as necessary.

Do you know how much interactions are worth? Think about conversion value. If you’re running a campaign to raise the number of brochure downloads but also want to add a ROI element, do you know how much a download is potentially worth? Is it a fixed number or is it an average? It may be that you can track them to purchase, but if not, can you work out what value is generated? Placing accurate values on customer interactions is extremely important when analysing return on any marketing expenditure.

Focus On Planning

The research, planning and questioning stages are when objectives start to become more of a reality. If we are aiming to deliver that £z, how are we going to do it? This is where you need to be very certain on how you are going to communicate with your target audience. Understand how your audience communicates, interacts and ultimately, where they are making their purchasing decision. Once you have all of this data, build a plan around it. Think about timings, channels, allocation of budgets, what resources that you need. What do ultimately need to action to achieve the objectives that you have set out.

Choice of Channel

The customer journey, your budget plus the intricacy of measuring that you want to carry out all of an impact on which marketing channel that you decide to use. All channels have different levels of analysis available to it. Take print vs pay-per-click for example. We all know that on the whole, the level of data available from running a PPC campaign far outweighs that of a printed campaign in a magazine. However, if 90% of your customers made their buying decision whilst looking through trade press, but because you couldn’t measure the results as much as PPC, would you not advertise in it?

Channel choice in the wider picture is all about balance and maximising opportunities. Marketing managers in the current workplace are under immense amounts of scrutiny when it comes to ROI. That’s a given. But the careful selection of channels combined with balanced set of objectives is the winning formula. Choose the channels that achieve your objectives.

Review And Improve

So, the campaign is at an end. The time has come to do a full review and de-brief. Run through the results, compare to targets, compare to historic results and do as much reviewing as you want. But a warning! Make sure that your time is focused on the ‘so what?’ Do not review just because you think that you have to. Do it to improve your next campaign. Learn from the results. Look to explore why the results came out the way that they did. Question what’s happened and how it can be better next time.

If you want help achieving results or even helping to set up a strategy to measure marketing efficiency, get in touch. We have a highly experienced team who deliver, review and improve.

Thanks for reading,

Frank


frank@ib3.uk
07850 729444