As a marketer, your job is to make each and every campaign a smashing success. You’ve been tasked with raising brand awareness, boosting sales, and acquiring new customers—and you’re likely measuring that success with all of the data you can get your hands on.
To gain actionable insights and measure the true success of a content marketing campaign, you need to distinguish between arbitrary numbers and impactful ones. Say you’re looking to build sales by 10% using a bold social media campaign. You can drive up your Facebook following by tens of thousands of users—but until you look at how many of those users converted to sales, you can’t actually tell if your strategy is effective in meeting your goals.
You didn’t work for months crafting creative copy just to have a box office flop—you have a campaign with the potential to create major brand impact. Today, we’re sharing how you can measure success, shift gears when a strategy isn’t working, and get the ROI your blockbuster deserves.
Measuring your premiere with the right metrics
Some numbers are “nice to have” (like follower counts and open rates). Some are golden metrics that will earn you critical acclaim among your organization’s C-suite. Knowing what metrics to measure—and how to analyze them—gives you a competitive advantage and helps you adapt to hit those KPIs.
- Traffic—and traffic by source. Your web traffic, though broad, is still incredibly important and not to be underestimated. Especially when you’re launching an exciting campaign, you want to track how many unique views and total views your site is getting. Furthermore, it’s important to know who these viewers are and how they’re finding you. If you’re getting a lot of organic views, your SEO efforts may be paying off. If your social traffic is low, you may need a punchier sharing strategy on certain platforms.
- Click-through rate (CTR). The click-through rate is important whether you’re an email marketer or advertiser. Rather than only looking at how many people opened an email or viewed an ad, it’s important to know what percentage of your target audience are engaging with it. Improving your CTR can also potentially improve your Quality Score and placement on Google AdWords and other search marketing platforms. To calculate your CTR, divide total clicks by the number of impressions (or opens).
- Bounce rate. A bounce rate can demonstrate some areas of weakness. This can be defined as the number of people who visit your website and navigate away after one page (for instance, the home page). They’re not clicking around for more. It’s normal to experience fluctuations in traffic, but ideally your long-term bounce rate will be below 50% (or even 30%) and people will be spending longer on your site.
- Exit rate. Though seemingly similar to the bounce rate, exit rates actually indicate the last page someone viewed before navigating away. (This is in comparison to your total web traffic). If people are attracted to your home page and your about page—then exit away from your services—this may be a sign that you’re not presenting your offerings in a way that makes people want to buy them.
- Conversion rate. How many viewers and visitors are actually contacting you—or buying your product? The overall success of a marketing campaign depends on how well you reach your goals. It can be rewarding to know that someone read 5 of your blog posts over the course of 30 minutes—but if they aren’t inquiring about your services, that’s not exactly a customer won, either. A strong conversion rate will definitely vary based on what you’re trying to accomplish and the industry you’re in. Increasing your campaign conversion rates over time can indicate your brand presence is growing and your efforts are paying off.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC). You may be familiar with measuring your cost per acquisition (CPA)—that is, the cost of any viable lead, email sign-up, and the like. What’s more valuable is the customer acquisition cost, or how many dollars it actually takes to win a customer versus what you spent on marketing efforts. To perform a simple CAC calculation, take the cost of your marketing spend for a given campaign and divide it by the number of customers acquired to get a dollar amount.
All of these metrics are crucial in understanding your campaign success. However, if something isn’t working, it may be time to pivot your strategy and ensure your efforts aren’t going to waste—or cutting into your bottom line.
Bonus cuts: revamping your campaign
If you’re not hitting your numbers in a specified time period, two of the best things you can do are to either reengage targets or target new audience members.
Strategies might include expanding outside of your go-to channels or reminding your audience to explore your offerings. Whether it’s adding a paid social boost to your organic marketing efforts or sending out a seasonal e-blast promoting your campaign, there are ways to boost engagement even after numbers drop. You may even find a surprising audience segment or demographic consistently viewing your posts, and can create more content targeted towards them.
That being said, if it’s been a matter of weeks (or months) and your marketing budget is inching toward the red with little return, it might be best to move on and create your next cinematic masterpiece.
Expanding your marketing efforts—without expanding cost
When you’re a small team with siloed expertise, it can be difficult to make your content stand out. Great copy is hard to come by—and it can be exceedingly hard to create in-house. But to rival the big guys in your industry, you need campaigns on par with theirs (that don’t break the bank).
Outsourcing your content strategy and copywriting can help you make a bigger splash every time. A copywriting agency like MarketSmiths acts as an extension of your team—helping you scale efforts on a limited budget—without requiring you to increase manpower or costs.
Interested in making your copy a box-office hit every time? Contact us today.
