How to successfully track marketing results
Launching a marketing campaign should achieve certain goals and objectives for your business. If you’re not tracking or measuring anything, then you won’t know whether your marketing plan is successful. Here are some tips on why measuring the performance of a campaign is important, along with different tracking methods.
Reasons to track marketing
Develop strategic goals
The most important reason to track marketing results is to develop the strategic growth of your entire organization via the marketing campaign. A successful campaign should have specific actionable and measurable goals rather than broadly defined aspirations. For example, “getting website traffic from 10,000 customers” is a better goal than “improve website traffic exposure.”
Tracking results is the other side of the strategic marketing equation. Modern techniques allow your team to gain insight into more than your goal’s progress. Proper tracking techniques let you analyze and segment the types of customers that are coming to your website, where they are coming from and their behavior on your website. This gives you much more power to market your business toward your target audience
Compare marketing platforms
Tracking marketing results also gives insight into the specific performance of one platform or advertising service over another. For example, a social media marketing campaign allows you to analyze the total amount of impressions or unique visitors coming from different sources. This allows you to place a return on investment from each advertising spend.
Different methods of tracking
How you track marketing results depends on the specific medium chosen to engage your audience. For example, web and digital marketing platforms offer unprecedented levels of access and marketing data compared to traditional marketing mediums such as print, TV and radio.
Tracking traditional marketing media
For traditional marketing media such as television and radio, one of the ways to measure marketing results is with call tracking. By assigning a unique telephone number to each specific advertisement, call tracking allows your team to monitor the volume and frequency of calls to each phone number and then analyze and compare the overall success of each advertisement.
Tracking digital marketing media
Digital marketing can take many forms, but ultimately tracking online marketing activity accomplishes the goal of improving your digital conversion rate. Many third-party digital services such as Facebook and Twitter provide internal dashboards and tracking services automatically. For content marketing campaigns where you are driving traffic to your website from a multitude of online sources, set up a distinct URL associated for each landing page. Techniques such as A/B testing let you compare how minor changes within your messaging might lead to different results.
Best practices for tracking marketing results
A marketer must think like a scientist when it comes to tracking and analyzing results. Remember that the oft-repeated phrase that “correlation does not imply causation” can absolutely be true when it comes to certain patterns in the raw volume of data you are measuring. Careful analysis and interpretation of results can mean the difference between developing the right vs. wrong marketing strategy.
At the same time, collecting and measuring marketing results should lead to a personalized approach in subsequent communications with your audience. If you notice a large spike in volume from a particular customer segment, you can tailor future content and ads to resonate with your audience.
W. O’Donnell Consulting can help you choose and implement tracking software to drive better marketing results. With decades of experience in IT consulting and digital marketing, we will give your organization the ability to transform insights into success.
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W. O’Donnell Consulting, Inc.
153 West 27th Street, Suite 903,
New York, NY 10001
Telephone: (212) 838-3339
FAX: (212) 838-1611
E-mail: info@wodonnell.com
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Free Consultation
W. O’Donnell Consulting, Inc.
153 West 27th Street, Suite 903,
New York, NY 10001
Telephone: (212) 838-3339
FAX: (212) 838-1611
E-mail: info@wodonnell.com