Companies have two halves: the half that makes things, and the half that sells the things that are made. Marketing campaigns do the heavy lifting of the latter, and really have an impressive amount of power over whether an organization’s goods and services succeed or fail.
However, how do we know when our marketing succeeds or fails? We know – sales numbers at the end of the quarter. But by then it’s too late. A savvy marketing team will test the waters regularly to see if their campaign is working long before the numbers come out. This allows them to course-correct and maximize their investments. Let’s look at how the sales arm can set up for success – and then tell if their marketing campaign is working.
Step 1: Craft a Winning Marketing Strategy
If you’re hoping to anticipate winning results, you need to start with a winning strategy. That strategy, however broad or detailed, needs to include a few crucial elements:
1. Set up buckets for catching customer insights | Before you even begin, recognize that feedback is the key to your success and set up predictable, systematic ways of gleaning that from your customers before you let valuable data slip through your hands.
2. Utilize customer testimonials | Nothing sells your brand like authentic users who can communicate on the same level as your prospective customers. While this can include influencers, this must also include printed customer testimonials wherever your products are sold – articles, web pages, social media, or print. People tend to trust their peers more than “marketing speak,” and corroborating human experiences give your claims credibility.
3. Optimize your content to maximize social shares | When you devote time and resources to crafting social media content, you want to get the most ROI from your investment. Some strategic tactics include:
- Asking readers to share your content
- Utilizing powerful images
- Crafting eye-catching headlines
- Capitalizing on holidays and major events
- Placing CTAs at the top – not bottom – of your web page
There is obviously more that goes into starting off on the right marketing foot, but the previous three points are critical areas that often get overlooked.
Step 2: “Define Success” and Any Achievable Outcomes
Now that your plan is in place, you need to define what success looks like so that when your marketing campaign is working, you’ll know it. Keep in mind that specifics not only clarify your outcomes but help justify your campaign to higher-ups when they can see the proof of your success on paper.
Some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you want to track include:
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) | How much revenue originates from each ad dollar spent?
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) | How much value can that customer be expected to bring in over their customer lifetime with your company? If your average customer lifetime is two years and they pay a $10 monthly subscription, that would be $200.
- Conversion Rate | How many site visitors converted into leads? How many targeted in your campaign will buy as a result?
- Cost Per Lead | How many ad dollars did you have to spend to get one lead? The lower the rate the better, obviously, but it’s all relative. Say you spent $100 per lead (a typically high amount) but the CLV is $5,000. That’s a 500% ROI – not bad at all.
- Website Traffic | If you just threw new content up on your site, how well is it doing? Is it drawing more visitors than your content before? Track and adjust if necessary.
- Bounce Rate | This really tells you if your content is working. Are people jumping to your site because of a catchy headline but failing to investigate your offerings further? The bounce rate will tell you how many people come to stay, and how many “bounce” off your site without checking out at least one other page. If you keep it under 40% you’re doing well.
Defining these key indicators and tracking them diligently is the most logical, effective, and repeatable way to know if your marketing campaign is “working” – and if it’s not, to know where it’s falling flat.
Step 3: Report Data-Driven Marketing Metrics
Nowadays, artificial intelligence and an abundance of open-source marketing analytics tools make data-driven marketing not only accessible but the norm. Data is required to justify your initiatives to the C-suite for approval, and it also helps prove to them that you’ve done your job (because you have the cold figures to back it up). Depending on your resources and the expertise of your team, you may even want to look into marketing consulting agencies who are familiar with the tooling (heavyweight marketing and analytics solutions), know how to use the technology (AI-driven metrics platforms), and have the cycles to spare to produce monthly reports of progress.
However you choose to handle this last part of using hard data to track your results, it cannot be botched. After putting in so much work to think of the right campaign, catch customer insights, and identify indicators of success, it would be a waste to have one of the most effective campaigns of your career – and not even know it.
