How to effectively evaluate your marketing strategy
So you’ve finally done it. After many months of strategizing and constant back-and-forth with your fellow marketers, you’ve deployed your brand-new marketing strategy. You’re confident that this time, the company’s sales figures will at least double, and your audience will balloon in size.
But then that’s not what happens, and you’ve no idea why. Unfortunately, that’s the price marketers pay for not tracking and evaluating marketing strategies after deploying them. This article will look at why you should evaluate your marketing, what happens if you don’t, and how to do it effectively.
Why evaluate your marketing results?
No marketing strategy is made perfect. There is always something you can change and improve to achieve even greater results. But, if you do not track, compare, and evaluate your progress, you’ll never even know something is wrong, let alone what it is.
Some of the most common issues marketers encounter are trying to appeal to the wrong audience, choosing bad communication channels or content types, or simply just setting their expectations too high.
The consequences of these mishaps can be dire. Beyond simple disappointment, they can cause significant financial setbacks, like loss of revenue, budget cuts, shrinking audience, and more. Luckily, these things aren’t set in stone, and if you know what you’re doing and have the right tools for the job, you can find and fix any undesirable aspects of your marketing strategy.
The 3 steps to effectively evaluate your marketing strategy
Evaluation and adjustment may seem like the final piece of the puzzle of your marketing strategy, placed firmly at the end of the process. However, as you’ll soon see, it begins far earlier than that – right at the very start.
Step 1) Choose statistics to track
Each strategy should be created with a specific goal in mind. Conversely, you should choose appropriate statistics to keep track of to determine how well you’re doing. And to do that, you need to learn about metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Generally, we use “metrics” to refer to any statistic that can be used to measure a process. Meanwhile, KPIs are metrics specifically focused on your campaign’s targets and objectives.
First, you should choose the KPIs that best reflect your current marketing goals.
For example, these can be:
- Client value
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Sales revenue
- Lead to client ratio
- Inbound marketing Revenue on Investment (ROI)
- Volume of organic traffic
- Website traffic to lead ratio
- Conversion rate of landing pages
Then, you should select the metrics you’ll use to evaluate your overall marketing progress, the efficiency of your content, and anything else you desire. Such metrics can include:
- Exit rate (how many people left your site on a specific page)
- Bounce rate (how many people left your site immediately after opening it)
- Conversion rate (how many people completed a desired action, i.e. signed up for a newsletter, downloaded an ebook, etc.)
- Sessions (how many people spent a prolonged time interacting with a site/app)
- Pageviews
- Impressions (how many people saw your content)
- Engagement (how many people interacted with your content, i.e. left a like, comment, etc.)
- Overall ROI
- Average session duration
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
However, choosing the metrics and KPIs most suited to your business goals is just the first step. Now that you have the “what”, it’s time to look at “when”.
Step 2) Define a timeframe
Actioning a strategy with no clear idea of what time you want to achieve your goals is ineffective. Although marketing, especially content marketing, is a longterm process, that does not mean you shouldn’t evaluate your progress regularly.
Keep in mind that the average strategy takes around 12 – 18 months to make a return on investment. But you should be evaluating your results much more frequently than that. Some companies hold weekly or monthly meetings to go over their latest numbers. That may be too often for some, but you should try to do it at least every 3 – 6 months.
Step 3) Choose the right tools for the job
Marketers can and should use many tools and applications to track their performance — some of which we’ve already mentioned in our 7 focuses of modern marketing ebook. But we’ll give a quick rundown regardless for those who haven’t read it.
Some of the absolute must-have tools for marketing analysis are:
- Google Analytics is the go-to industry standard for all your online digital analysis needs. It offers a great variety of focused dashboards you could spend days deep-diving into.
- Social Media Analytics are analytics systems specifically made for their platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). If a part of your campaign is focused on social media, you’ll appreciate the ability to easily track metrics such as engagement, impressions, and more.
- SEO Tools give you insight into how search engines and people view your published content. By using them to your advantage, you can ensure your content always shows up to the people who need it the most at the right time.
The fun part comes after you choose your statistics, timeframe, and tools. Finally, it’s time to implement and improve your marketing strategy. Track your data dilligently. Study it both individually and as part of a bigger picture. Finally, transform the data into relevant insights and let them inform your marketing decisions.
It may take a little effort, but the hard work pays off in the end. After all, the ability to learn from mistakes and continually improve is what differentiates the companies that fail from those which thrive.
But if you find you struggle with interpreting your results and need a helping hand, try Marmind. Our software can help you monitor your campaign performance across multiple channels, define KPIs, and track results per campaign or individual action. All with corresponding graphs, tables, and other visualizations.
Build custom charts, analyze performance in real-time, bookmark views, share them with your colleagues and more. In short, Marmind can aid all of your marketing analysis and evaluation needs. Book a demo if you want to know more.
Author
Peter Fechter
Peter Fechter is Digital Marketing Manager at MARMIND and is mainly responsible for website and lead management. When he's not busy creating content, he creates new campaigns.
