Measuring marketing performance

It’s no use hitting publish on a great piece of content if you’ve not considered how you’ll track its performance. Sofiane Kennouche dives into some of the key things you should consider when measuring your success.

If you’ve decided that strategic content marketing is a key part of your marketing mix, half the battle is creating the content. The other, just as important, part, is to track, measure and evaluate its performance. It’s this latter step which will allow you to better understand the needs and desires of your clients, as well as the challenges people are looking for answers to in your industry.

Measuring marketing performance is vital for justifying your marketing spend, sharing out budget costs effectively and establishing campaign baselines.

Missed out on the importance of knowing your audience and setting objectives before you begin? Our earlier blog, ‘An Introduction to Content Marketing’, shows how providing insightful content can help build a lasting relationship between your brand and customers, boosting your business.

Here’s a short guide to the key steps you should consider when measuring your marketing performance.

How will you measure success?

There are several different ways to calculate marketing return on investment (ROI). One of the most popular and readily-understood formulas is detailed below.[1]

(Sales Growth – Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Marketing ROI)

It’s vital to consider the impact of organic sales growth, as by subtracting this from overall sales growth, we can get a more realistic impression of marketing impact – adding further legitimacy to your efforts. What constitutes an actionable ‘return’ varies depending on marketing strategy and the financial structure of your organisation, with the following key elements often factoring in marketing ROI calculations.

Calculating total revenue gained from a particular campaign gives marketers a clear, holistic overview of their efforts – and is vital for strategic media planning, budget allocation and assessing overall marketing impact.

In addition, calculating gross profit helps to put the total revenue generated by marketing in context, by relating it to the cost of production or delivery of the organisations’ goods and services. To calculate this, add the following to your marketing ROI formula: = (Total revenue – cost of goods to deliver a product). In a similar vein, net profit can be calculated with this sum: = (Gross profit – additional expenses).

Above all, ‘what good looks like’ will depend very much upon the goals of your marketing campaign, tailored to fit the unique needs of your business.

Master your metrics

Whether it’s posting on LinkedIn or Facebook, an email marketing campaign or driving traffic to a new product or service on your website, ensure you’re on top of your metric game and aware of the nuances in each platform or tool you use. The in-built analytics capabilities on Facebook (Business Suite) and LinkedIn (LinkedIn Analytics), for example, are a great starting point to see how your blog, video, or datasheet is being received by your followers. Using metrics such as engagement rate, interactions, comments and shares, you can establish which content is resonating with our audience and tailor future offerings to suit. These metrics are especially important if you are promoting paid content, allowing you to track your conversion rate of browsers to buyers, for example.

Of course, your measurement metrics will vary depending on the goals of your marketing objectives. Google Analytics, for example, is a popular tool for uncovering everything from how your clients find your website, to seeing which pages they view as they travel through it. Though the dashboards can be fearsomely complex, it’s worth training yourself to get the best from the platform. If you want to improve the ranking of your webpages on search engines, you’ll need to ensure they are populated with regularly updated content and full of search engine optimisation (SEO)-friendly keywords.

Talk to sales teams

It’s crucial to remember that the modern marketing mix is an omnichannel experience, with an average of six touchpoints made before a customer reaches a buying decision[1]. It’s vital that the experience and knowledge of your organisation’s client-facing staff is taken into account when analysing your campaign performance, as this team is often best-placed to advise on common ‘pain points’ and challenges facing your clients.

Did enquiries and sales increase on a particular service following a week of paid promotion on social media? How did the client become aware of the product or service in the first place? Which solutions are really in demand at the moment from your peers or competitors? Linking numbers of sales/enquiries in a given timeframe to existing campaigns can help to quickly and easily demonstrate the influence of marketing spend to stakeholders, clients and colleagues alike – and also gives you something current to blog about!

Strategic content marketing is a great vehicle to improve sales, brand awareness and reputation via your owned, paid and earned media outputs. For more information on how we can help you to achieve your business objectives with results-driven marketing, drop us a line at denise@dsqmarketing.com.

[1] https://www.marketingevolution.com/marketing-essentials/marketing-roi