Measure Marketing Performance: 5 Easy Steps

Every marketer and business owner should ask this question, “How can I measure marketing performance?” This is because everything you do in your business must have measurable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or ROIs (Return on Investment).

This is true when exploring how all forms of online and offline marketing efforts perform. 

But what do you need to measure? Well, when it comes to online marketing, the visual and written content you place (or pay to be identified) must be tested out or even measured before launching your media buying plan to ensure it’s successful.  

Not just that, you need to test to whom your campaign reaches, what actions they take, and if that is the action you aimed for!   

In most cases, the longevity and success of online marketing updates see results far more rapidly than any other offline method in marketing.  

It’s said measuring your marketing performance might not be simple unless you do it the right way!

Well, are you looking to improve your marketing performance, or do you want to learn how to measure your strategy effectively but need help figuring out where to start?

Have no fear! This article will show you how to measure marketing performance in simple steps. By conducting market research and analysing your data, you can identify areas of improvement and make changes to help achieve your marketing goals.

So, let’s get started!

How to Measure Marketing Performance 

Step 1: Set Measurable Goals Before Launching Your Campaign 

If you utilise content marketing, you need to have marketing goals. If you depend on paid placement, you need to measure performance to determine the success of each campaign.

If you take advantage of email marketing, you need to set goals for each piece of content.    

When it comes to measuring marketing performance, the best way to define if this campaign was successful or if some adjustments are required is to depict the goal of each piece of content.

Some content aims for more conversions by directing potential leads to landing pages, while others are geared towards building online brand awareness, such as social media campaigns.

Some ads have one target; sales. That’s why you must set criteria and identify key factors of measurement that are most valuable to you and your end goal. 

Your list of pre-prepared goals will help you understand whether you’ve accomplished your desired result and identify the points you need to improve in the long term. 

Let’s take this example. Today it doesn’t make sense to press a publish button or post any piece of content and pray that it’s going to hit!

There are many variables in this equation. You have different marketing metrics to measure success. For example, you might say it was a brilliant campaign with outstanding results if sales have been generated, you receive many messages, or traffic has been driven to your website.

How can I define my goals?

Well, you’re the only one who can answer this question. However, we can help you with a list of the most common goals of any campaign. Otherwise, feel free to create your own. 

• Brand awareness
• Generate leads
• Customer acquisition 
• Engagement
• Customer retention/ loyalty 
•  Website traffic.

So what can you do?

• Each blog post, paid ad, and email campaign should have a defined goal.
• Define the expected results from each action your marketing department makes. 
• Conduct detailed research to sell your goal and understand your customers.
• Create multiple buyer personas and test each one until you settle on the perfect customer for your case.
• Compile precise keywords that you will target your audience through. 
• Create customer-oriented content.
• Craft well-tuned content that will resonate with readers to entice them to spend more time on your website. 
• Use the right tools and metrics to help you understand if the content is relevant or not to the audience.
• Create valuable and informative content to rank higher on Google because no one cares about the second, third, fourth or even tenth search results page; we often only look at the first page of results.  

The result:

If the number of impressions you get exceeds your expectations, but your revenue doesn’t increase, or you fail to attract quality leads, then you have a problem planning or maybe your call to action (CTA) isn’t strong enough — unless your goal was to just bring awareness to your brand.

Then get back to your goals and set up a SMART framework or adjust what you have done so far.

Step 2: Be Rational

It’s hard not to get disappointed when your campaign fails to steal your audience’s attention, you can’t see the results you expected, or there is no clear proof that your campaigns deliver the relative value you’re swearing to gain.

It might be a result of unclear performance. But there is another thing you may need to think of. You may have set unrealistic objectives.

It’s one of the most common problems that would lead to confusion for all your marketing team.

As much as it hurts to spell it out, sometimes the biggest driver of a campaign’s success is out of your control. 

Based on a report published by data2decisions, many factors drive the success of your marketing activities, things such as the company’s market share, brand power, and overall market size.

These factors have more than 18x power than advertising campaigns.

In other words, the larger your brand is, the higher the marketing investment return that can be generated.

The ugly truth is that big brands with big names will get better results because they are better known. They will receive more shareable content because customers trust them more. 

That’s why it’s crucial to write down only realistic expectations that will help you get motivated to go forward without setting the bar too high.

So what can you do?

• Set achievable goals for your advertising, and if you see they cannot be done within your scope and budget, be flexible to adjust your objectives.

• Invest in growth to make your campaign resonate with the right audience.  

• Be creative with what you have done.

• Look for holes in the strategies of your significant competitors so you may fill them in.

• Imitate, not copy! You can replicate the whole idea or some components but never ever copy their campaigns. Get inspired from many sources and create your unique one.   

• You need to notice any indicators of your campaign collapse to know how to fix them as early as possible. 

The result

As mentioned, large brands with a positive image will get high ROI even with poor ad ideas. On the other hand, small brands need help to achieve the same numbers of booming even with perfect execution of the marketing advertising. 

However, you can get profitable ROI with a highly-originated marketing strategy and optimising the most relevant tools. For example, hiring an expert marketer or a digital marketing team will put a measurable action to generate more customers and help you grow gradually.

Then remember it doesn’t matter how many readers visit your websites daily or how many calls or demos they book if they’re not your clients. Likewise, it doesn’t matter if your current leads will not convert to sales. 

On paper, your content is buzzing; in reality, you generate zero revenue. So, focus only on who will enhance your sales figures. The result is you will be able to make your campaigns more profitable over time. 

Step 3: Define Your Return on investment (ROI)

Today, many companies complain that they must determine if their marketing activities work.

The answer is ROI…

Many marketing terms you need to have a good understanding of, but the return on investment or ROI is listed atop, especially if you want to define how to measure marketing performance in terms of how much the marketing department spends and how much results you get.  

Tracking ROI requires a complete picture of what sales you can generate from marketing activities. 

Why?

Bear with me in this example. Let’s see you run a social media campaign, and you plan to generate £4000, which costs £1500. Some posts get 2000 likes; others gain 200 shares. 

So what?

Measuring the number of conversions is challenging, but you can measure your ROI regarding the desired sales. 

The excellent ROI will be £2500.

What if you’re planning just to build awareness? Then you can set out your ROI depending on how much customer engagement has been generated. 

So what can you do?

• Define your goals. What exactly do you want to achieve with your marketing campaign? Without clear goals, it won’t be easy to measure success.

• Do your research. Know your target audience inside and out. What are your audience’s needs and wants? What type of messaging will resonate with them?

• Break down all the key metrics you need to track your marketing performance.

• Learn how to get more data more quickly by producing valuable reports you will need to analyse and know how to measure marketing performance. 

• Ask your marketing team to prepare a guide to marketing measurement at each step of your marketing campaign. 

• Test, test, test. A/B testing is essential for any successful marketing campaign.

The result

In a perfect world, your marketing team can achieve the ROI and even exceed it. However, in the real world, you will want to experiment with alternative ways until you find the best approach.

And even if you find it, don’t get stuck within for long. Instead, constantly update your strategy and be ready to make use of new trends. 

Step 4: Take Advantage of Website Analytics

As we are talking about digital marketing campaigns, you need to use the right tools. Many platforms are out there to monitor your marketing initiatives, allowing you to track many traditional metrics such as referrals and traffic. 

That could complicate your job in choosing the best platform for you. However, it depends on your goals, but the most effective software is a platform that enables you to track any data at a visitor level, both anonymous and known.

This feature allows you to isolate each specific activity down to particular prospects. 

Additionally, whether you had your website built or built through a WordPress blog, ensure that you have access to your website’s statistics (daily, weekly, and monthly).

What can you do?

• Use Google Analytics. This free tool gives you a lot of insights into your website traffic. You can see how much traffic your site is, where visitors are coming from, what pages they’re looking at, and more. Otherwise, you can invest in the premium account for more advanced features to dig deeper into your customer persona. 

• Look at the referral traffic that comes to your site from other websites. If you see that a particular website is sending a lot of traffic your way, you may want to reach out to them and see if you can collaborate in some way.

• Check out your social media traffic. See which social media platforms are sending the most visitors to your site.

The result

You will clearly know your customer’s purchasing habits and visitors’ journey inside your website. That will be beneficial for your content marketing strategy, and you will be able to determine what works well and your area of opportunity. Also, you can answer many questions, such as:

• What are the increases and decreases in traffic from month to month and even year to year?
• What countries do most of your traffic come from?
• What time of day brings your highest traffic?
• What days generate the most traffic?
• What are the most-visited pages?
• What are your least popular pages?
• How many new or repeat visitors is your website gaining?
• What is the average time spent per page?
• How many of your visitors get access to your website through mobile devices or desktop devices? 
• How many of your website visitors have downloaded your ebook or signed up for your releases and so? 

Step 5: Explore Your Brand Share of Voice (SOV)

If you are eager to measure marketing performance objectively, then it’s time to pay more attention to Share of Voice (SOV). It’s a marketing metric that tells you what percentage of the conversation around your topic is happening on your channels.

It shouldn’t be overlooked when figuring out how to measure marketing performance because it gives you an idea of how well you’re promoting your brand and how engaged your audience is. 

In other words, it’s an indicator of the market share that your company holds among its competitors when advertising. 

If you have a high SOV, you’re doing a good job promoting your brand and driving engagement. That can lead to more customers and better sales. Additionally, a high SOV can help build brand awareness and equity. And it also means that your brand will obtain a larger market share in the long term. 

Conversely, if you have a low SOV, it could indicate that you need to improve your marketing efforts. Low engagement could also lead to lower sales and less brand awareness.

Between both, there are companies which can exceed their brand’s share of voice, and it’s called eSOV, Excess Share of Voice. 

What can you do?

• Invest more in marketing to expand your outreach by increasing brand awareness, especially if you have a small business and big ambitions.

• Launch a plan to build a strong brand image. 

• Keep your eye on steady growth that will bring you more recognition. 

• Use the right dashboards to help you visualise your data efficiently and build your strategy.

• Know who you’re up against, take a look at their online presence and see how often they’re mentioned across social media, blogs, and other forums. That will give you an idea of their SOV.

• Consider using a tool like Google Alerts or Mention. These tools allow you to track all online mentions of your brand in real-time. This way, you can quickly see how often your brand is being talked about online and compare it against your competitor’s SOV.

The result 

Building SOV is a significant challenge for all businesses because many companies depend on a segmentation strategy where they focus on a niche to create narrowly concentrated marketing campaigns to attract their qualified clients.

While this strategy pays off and they can grow gradually, they leave the whole market to leaders who can gain more momentum and increase their SOV.

By defining your Share of Voice, you can maximise your marketing efforts, build a competitive edge, and measure marketing performance (such as how many people know your brand and how many times they come across it online?)

Eventually, you will have a clear idea of what works for you and what you need to improve for your brand image. 

How Can Profiletree Help You?

The business world changes constantly, and we are equipped to help you move with the times. We offer many services in digital marketing and can help you to improve your marketing performance starting today.

Even the best business can struggle to market its product without the proper guidance and information, and at Profiletree, we are more than happy to teach you digital strategies to improve your marketing performance.

You need to do things differently, and that’s what we can help you with! We are a results-driven social marketing agency that wants to help your business!

If you want more insights into your specific marketing performance, you can call us now and book your first discussion session.