Unless your product or service is something that is able to sell itself, you will need to come up with marketing campaigns that will promote it and, by extension, your business. But the work does not stop there—you still need to identify the effectiveness of your campaigns as well as trace customer behavior for future improvements.
This is where marketing campaign monitoring comes in.
Why You Should Monitor Your Campaigns
Monitoring basically allows you to determine if your campaign is indeed working and how the marketing techniques you used are performing. To appreciate this process more, here are some of its advantages:
Learn your customer’s behavior
You’ve probably heard loads of times how knowing your target audience will greatly advance your business’ goals. When you monitor your campaign, you can observe and track your customers’ purchasing behavior, as well as find out which approaches influence them to buy and which don’t.
Master the techniques that prove to be effective
When you know which among your strategies are preferred by your target audience, you can work on perfecting these until you turn satisfied customers into loyal ones. You can also refine the ones that didn’t succeed given enough resources.
Manage your finances better
Marketing campaigns require financial investment, and so does the monitoring. If you’re able to effectively track the performance of your campaigns, you would know if you’re placing your money on the right investment or if you have to switch to a potentially better technique.
Establish a good online reputation
Actively monitoring your campaigns communicates open-mindedness and flexibility, among other traits. Part of this job is making connections and friends in the business, as well as acquiring customers who will hopefully share the word about you after being satisfied by your product or service.
Useful Tips
If you think you’re ready to monitor your own marketing campaign, here are some tips you can follow:
Set a criteria and evaluation metrics
Before you get started with the monitoring process, you have to first establish the parameters you will use. Use elements that can be quantified and assessed easily such as clicks, calls, actual sales, and profits.
You can expect these factors to be objective, thereby making it easier for the monitoring and reports to be transparent. And since the kind of results these factors manifest is often numerical, they are easier to compare with the targets than with qualitative data such as comments.
Create a special landing page
Speaking of clicks, one of the most common and effective ways to gauge whether your marketing campaign works is by creating its own landing page. However, while most of the traffic that the landing page will generate can be assumed as a response to the campaign, keep in mind that there are things such as bounce rates and honest clicking mistakes. This is another reason why you need to have guidelines—so that you would know in which category each response falls and what you should do about it.
Know what your customers think
One of the simplest and most straightforward means of knowing how prospective clientele learned about your business is by asking existing customers how they learned about you. When launching a marketing campaign, it’s ideal to spread word through different channels such as social media, television, and personal interaction to attract people to visit your website.
These same means can be used to invite customers, existing and potential, to give you feedback. Finding out where they hear about you can help determine which channel you are most effective in and which are the ones you need to concentrate on.
Actionable Steps
After you’ve aggregated enough data to evaluate your marketing campaign, you can’t simply stare at it and expect the letters and numbers to jumble and form solutions. So what’s your next step?
One of the actions you can execute is creating powerful pieces of content that are tailored according to what makes your audience tick (e.g. tone of the article, format of the content, etc.). Your sales will rely heavily not just on the products themselves but also on how you present them on your website and in social media.
You and your teammates can also coin your own jargon for the product, and in effect make it more personal amongst yourselves. This way, you’ll be able to talk about it in a way that is more intimate and convincing. A great example of this is Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, who coined the term “Inbound Marketing.”
Last but definitely not least is making sure your leads and your strategies are streamlined to have an organized and systematic way of proceeding with the marketing campaign. If your sales team isn’t prepared to deal with the influx of new leads from your campaigns, you’ll get little value out of them.
If you think these tips are helpful, or if you wish to contribute your own suggestions, feel free to drop us a line in the comments section.
About the Author
Kyle Kam is a marketing consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They also offer free affiliate marketing lessons for beginning and advanced affiliates. You can follow him on Twitter @undisputedkyle.
