Does this sound familiar: you run a marketing campaign and see great results. You happily report the results to your boss or your client. You never think about that campaign again.
For too many people, campaigns are created and ran but never iterated or improved upon. Often if a campaign has a singular purpose, like a product launch or a seasonal hook, it can make sense for the “one and done” approach. But more often than not, there are key findings from your marketing campaigns that can be invaluable to your strategy.
Whilst some marketing will be reactive by the very nature of living in the world in 2020, understanding your impact will help make all your future campaigns more successful.
What is marketing impact?
All marketing is created with the purpose of getting somebody to do something. It could be getting your audience to donate in the nonprofit space, or convincing new customers to trust your brand.
When measuring marketing campaigns you should focus equally on the metrics and the impact.
The metrics are things like:
- Page views
- Click through rate
- Social media engagements
- New purchases
But to measure the impact you should be looking at
- Brand awareness (social media listening is great for this)
- Retained customers
- Improvement in keyword positions
- Rolling monthly engagement figures
Metrics should be thought about as a one time evaluation. But by measuring impact, you’re thinking long term. And long term marketing creates a sustainable business.
What makes a good marketing campaign evaluation?
When you evaluate your marketing campaigns you should try to be thorough and fair. A good place to start can be by conducting a SWOT analysis to gain a broad understanding of the campaigns successes.
Once you have completed the SWOT, it’s crucial to put a plan in place to action your findings. When you collate both your “opportunities” and “threats”, you should never leave them hanging. This is where monthly evaluations can come in. If you action an opportunity to expand onto a new social network, monitor your metrics and impact on a monthly basis to see if your strategy is working.
Another key to good marketing campaign evaluations is to think outside the spreadsheets. If you’re the sort of marketer who keeps meticulous spreadsheets charting weekly growth of your business you need to take a step back and understand what those numbers mean in real life.
A week over week dip in the spreadsheets could have you running for the hills trying to optimize existing content, or doubling down on ad spend. But you need to check if there are any external forces at play. Has a competitor launched a new product? Has your audience taken a financial hit due to the stock market?
And finally, once you have completed your SWOT and understood your metrics outside of spreadsheets, you should evaluate your campaign impact. Are more people Googling your brand? Have you seen a consistent engagement increase? Have you improved your rankings on any important keywords?
If you use social listening to measure brand sentiment, how has the language of your audience changed?
If you offer a product or service, you could also measure customer referrals – how did they find out about you?
Impact presents itself in many different ways but it’s an absolutely crucial part of your marketing evaluations.