Marketing is a tricky business, and aside from spinning money-making slogans and enticing unwitting consumers with witty marketing antics and creative strategies – you need to be able to track your results. After all, what’s the point of creating an incredible marketing strategy when you don’t even know what aspects of it have worked or not? But how exactly do you track the success of a marketing campaign?
You may think that watching sales and monitoring product trends is the way forward, but let’s be honest – this is rather vague. So, it’s time to get your analytical head on and kick some marketing derrière! This is a brief overview to how you can track specific areas of your marketing campaign, allowing you to allocate your budget with complete confidence due to your insightful knowledge showcasing just how effective or ineffective certain area are.
Tip One: Ask Your Customers
It doesn’t matter if you want to track on or offline marketing (you should try and monitor both); one of the most effective and often overlooked methods of tracking how successful certain aspects of your marketing campaign are is by asking your customers. Where did you hear about us? It’s an easy question but, by gee, it’s a great one.
You find out in an instance where they heard about you – whether it’s direct mail, that advert you placed in the local newspaper or your new PPC campaign. Furthermore, if they’ve popped in store you’ll be able to tell what gender and age range certain aspects of your marketing campaign are appealing to.
Top Tip: Make a note and keep a record and you’ll soon start to spot trends!
Tip Two: Trackable Links, Phone Numbers & Discount Codes
Phone tracking is great – place it on your website, at the bottom of a direct mail leaflet or in an e-marketing newsletter and you can track how many phone calls are made as a direct result of that one marketing tool. It gives you great insight into your marketing strategy, and highlights what is generating the most traffic.
Links are good for tracking certain online marketing campaigns – specifically social media. Place a link on Facebook and Twitter using bit.ly and create a free biy.ly account and you can see how many clicks that one link generates. This can be used in conjunction with Google analytics which can be placed on your website to monitor how many people visit your website, what keyword was used to find your website and how long they spent on your website.
Discount codes are also really good at seeing which aspects of your marketing campaign are working – place a discount code on your Facebook page or in a magazine (use different ones) and you’ll see what has the most exposure and generates the most traffic. This is not always accurate as the codes tend to get spread across the internet.
Tip Three: Custom Landing Pages
This is great if you are running promotions and it works for both offline and online marketing techniques. Simply generate a landing page which has an easy and short URL e.g. www.Greatdeals.co.uk – by keeping it short and sweet people are more likely to remember it. Then using your Google analytics, watch how much traffic goes to the website and you’ll see how much your one marketing campaign is generating.
These are just a few ways to track the success of your marketing campaign and if you have a few tips of your own which you want to share be sure to leave us a comment below.
This article was written by Gayle Brown on behalf of GCL Direct, a leading telemarketing organisation who understands the value of providing clients with trackable results.
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