Something I hear from most of my clients and prospective clients is, “How will I know this is working?”, or something close to that. As business owners and marketers, you want to execute on marketing campaigns that accomplish the goals set forth. But how do you do that?
1. Know exactly what you want to get out of the campaign. It seems pretty silly but it is the most important to the success of the campaign, in my opinion. Too often I speak with clients and their answer to this is mostly “to increase revenue.” That is not a bad answer, in fact its’ a good answer. We just want to know how you want to increase revenue and which type of revenue you want to increase? Do you want more revenue for product A or B through D? Are there other services you offer that you could get more revenue out of that you aren’t marketing? More revenue is always a good thing, but as marketers we want to bring you the right kind of revenue, the kind that you aren’t already getting. Revenue that, you as the business owner thinks should be there, but you aren’t quite getting. As a business owner or marketer, once you have established a crystal-clear goal, it will make it much easier to accomplish it with marketing.
2. Be Open to new and out of the box ideas. Sometimes the “same old same old” won’t always be enough to get you to where you want to go. Trying new marketing and advertising tactics can help you reach a new audience that may not know you or be familiar with your business. This will also make some of the consumers who are familiar with you see you in a different light. Content marketing, promotions, high impact display advertising (rich media), and video are all things that not enough businesses are trying. These are all good examples of tactics where there is not a lot of saturation and you could take advantage of being one of the first in your industry to dive into.
3. Form a true partnership with your marketing or advertising agency. When you decide to partner with a marketing or advertising agency, do just that – PARTNER with them. I promise, when you partner with an agency, they want the campaign to be successful just as bad as you do. We do not enjoy going through the whole process of learning your business and building a campaign that checks all the boxes to meet your goals just to have it fail. The client and agency need to be together in this endeavor. Share Google Analytics access, help them show you how it worked. Share revenue numbers for the products they are marketing, when they provide you with data, compare it to your client acquisition and be truthful about where leads came from. In the end this will help you understand if the campaign was successful, as well as to see the true VALUE of what the campaigns have brought in return.
4. Use / Setup goal conversions in Google Analytics. A good partner who knows and understands how to do this will help you. If a stated goal for a campaign is to get more registrations for an event, set a goal in Google Analytics for registrations. This will allow you to see how many people registered, how they got to your site, where on your site they were before they registered and what they did after. This will help you understand the customer journey to registration as well as what tactics you are executing that are driving registrations.
5. Last but not least. Utilize call tracking numbers, PURLs (personalized URLs), and landing pages built for conversions. This is the most straight forward way to track the success of campaigns. Use call tracking numbers and call recording to show call volume and compare these call lists to your new customer acquisition numbers. PURLs are a great way to track the online impact of offline tactics. Utilize a PURL in your printed tactics like the newspaper, magazines, and direct mail to show the impact on web traffic. Landing pages are another fantastic way to show the online impact of offline tactics. Using landing pages will help convert at a higher rate if they are built the right way. They need to be directly related to what the ads are showing, have only the basic information needed and encourage the consumer to convert with a call or form fill. If a consumer lands on your website looking for a piece of information that is not readily available on the page they land in, they get analysis paralysis. There is so much information and they don’t know where to go to find what they are looking for and they leave the site. Landing pages will help you avoid that.
Hopefully these tips can help you accurately identify the impact and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Consulting with a trusted digital specialist can make this process easier for any business. Contact DMG+ThriveHive today to help you grow your business with a strategic digital approach.
