Marketing strategies require months of hard work and investment. You pump loads of money into them, hoping that you see positive results. But what if you’re spending all of this cash without seeing anything in return? It’s a waste of money, which is why you must identify if your marketing strategy is flopping or succeeding from the word go.
You should never sit back and let your marketing strategy tick away in the background. Always be proactive and use these tips to make sense of your campaigns and if they’re working.
Determine Your KPIs
Key performance indicators – or KPIs for short – are things that tell you how well your marketing campaigns are doing. One definition from Gartner says that they are specific, numerical marketing metrics that measure progress toward a defined goal within marketing channels.
To track the performance of your campaigns, you need to know which KPIs to choose. Some include:
- Unique website visitors
- Conversion rates
- Sales revenue
- Customer lifetime value
- Click-through rates for emails
We could go on all day, but it’s your job to determine the KPIs. Different campaigns can have different key performance indicators; think about your overall goals from a strategy. If you’re running a social media campaign to drive traffic to your website, then the main KPIs will revolve around social media engagement and unique site visitors from your social channels.
Use Analytics Software
Armed with your KPIs, you can use analytics software to track them. Most marketers opt for Google Analytics as it has all the capabilities you need. Google recently introduced an update to its Analytics software, so it could be worth hiring a GA4 consultant to make sense of everything.
Regardless of the software you use, analytics will take data from your website and show you everything you could hope to know. You can quickly pick out your KPIs and measure them. See how many unique visitors you’re getting or track the conversion rates of your landing pages.
It’s the best way of understanding what’s going on and seeing a visual outlook of how your marketing efforts are helping.
Test, Retest & Test Again
Your analysis won’t always show positive things. Tracking your KPIs in Google Analytics could show that you’re severely underperforming. You may see shocking stats that indicate your new social media strategy is failing miserably – or your SEO campaign is terrible.
Spot the weak points in your marketing campaign and begin A/B testing. This is when you change a specific part of a campaign and see if it changes anything. For instance, you alter the placement of a CTA on your landing page and test to see if this boosts conversion rates or any other key data points. You then change something else or revert to the original and make a different change.
All the while, you’re using data analytics to monitor fluctuations until you reach the optimal setup. Constant testing helps you get to a point when your marketing strategy is finally achieving the initial goals and your KPIs are all on an upward trend.
If you haven’t done any of what’s been mentioned here, then you’re lagging behind. Don’t take a relaxed approach to marketing; it’s not a hands-off kind of thing. You must constantly monitor everything to truly discover if your strategy is a flop or a success.
