How to Analyze Marketing Campaigns
Marketing analytics are not to criticize the past, but rather a crystal ball to foresee and plan the future.
The process of ideation, planning, creating, and delivering a marketing campaign is exhausting and challenging—but in the end, rewarding. Once a campaign is live, you should be able to see the results in real time and possibly get an immediate sense of any success, or lack thereof. But when all is said and done, the most important thing you can do is to analyze marketing data when it’s finished, so you know how to improve marketing campaigns next time.
Every company approaches marketing campaign data analysis differently—some look at broader marketing data and interpret, others look more at the details and analyze against initial goals and objectives. There is no right or wrong way. But regardless of the approach, the data sources are always multifaceted and should be looked at as a crystal ball into the future, rather than an opportunity to criticize the past.
At Waypoint Marketing Communications, we believe it’s best to err on the more detailed side—garnering as much insight from the campaign data as possible so that everyone is armed with the most comprehensive, valuable knowledge when planning future marketing campaigns or creating an integrated marketing plan. This insight may include:
Understanding campaign successes or shortcomings when compared to the original goals and objectives.
Learning how the target audience responded to the campaign through their level of engagement/interest.
Understanding valuable “areas for improvement” and learnings for future marketing campaigns.
Deciphering what is going to happen in your sales funnel and what leads you need to actively pursue.
Because processes of marketing for manufacturing companies vary, we are sharing an overview of the most important elements to include in a post-campaign analysis.
What is Marketing Analysis?
Marketing analysis, or marketing campaign analysis, is a process that aids you in understanding various elements of your target audience—demographics, segments and psychographics—and discovering ways to better engage them to improve future conversions or sales. By conducting an analysis, you are aiming to enhance your future marketing campaigns, resulting in a better return on investment (ROI) for your marketing budget, increased brand awareness and improved lead generation.
Why is Marketing Analysis Important?
Simply put, marketing analysis is important because if activities don’t provide a good balance of cost and return, it’s not a good long-term strategy and needs to be eliminated or revised.
Drilling down, the greatest benefit of conducting marketing analysis is gaining knowledge on how to spend your marketing budget more effectively. Beyond this, it offers profound insights into your market—knowing what your customers think of your product, service, and company; improving your communication; understanding successful or unsuccessful methods to engage your audiences; and enhancing your marketing platforms. In a previous study, the Lenskold Group found that “companies making improvements in their measurement and ROI capabilities were more likely to report outgrowing competitors and a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency in their marketing.”
Marketing analysis is a key pathway to improving customer loyalty and satisfaction and knowing what influences your marketing strategies. Let’s break down the importance and share specific insights you can gain:
Improvement of ROI
Discovering new opportunities for marketing and sales efforts
Identifying SEO and keyword opportunities on your website and social channels
Identifying paid campaign opportunities
Break Down Your Digital Campaign Results by Channel
Digital marketing techniques can sometimes provide so much data that it can be overwhelming to sort through it, prioritize and garner the most valuable insights. Here are some of our top channel-specific objectives and corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs) to help show you the way.
Social Media: This marketing channel is primarily used to drive reach and build awareness. It offers the opportunity to expand the audience you were reaching through other efforts, and target messaging to those audiences. While social media plays an important role in every manufacturer’s marketing plan, it’s important to remember that organic reach is low and creative measures are needed to make these efforts effective. The WayPoint team believes quality is more important than quantity in this instance. Some important metrics to watch, include reach, frequency of posts, click-thru rate, and percentage of engaged impressions.
Search: With search campaigns, metrics can be broken out by paid and organic activities. While organic campaigns are more common, paid efforts are where the targeted messaging and impact of creative (e.g., images, video, etc.) are most measurable. However, effective paid search campaigns should include variations of the same ad and be tweaked throughout the lifetime of the campaign to ensure you are getting the most value. Here are some KPIs to consider watching during and after the campaign: click-thru rate, impressions, average position, and conversion rates.
Website: Your website is a foundational element your marketing efforts, but many marketers in industrial industries don’t see its potential. A website is the center of everything you do. It brings together and caters messaging, creative and conversion directives for prospects and customers. It’s the place where you can drive engagement and action. The metrics to consider here are: total traffic, engagement, sessions and conversions. These can now be measured through Google’s new analytics platform—GA4.
Analyze Traditional Marketing Campaign Results
While traditional marketing campaigns (e.g., radio, billboards, direct mail, print advertising, etc.) don’t provide you with the hard, obvious data that digital marketing does, as outlined above, there are things marketers can do to track conversions with these activities.
When building traditional marketing efforts, it’s important to gather traffic, demographic, and impression data from the vendors prior to making decisions on implementation. You then need to generate custom phone numbers, emails, and landing pages to direct audiences to for more information. Once the campaign is finished, you will be able to calculate the conversion numbers (i.e., how many people visited the landing page or called the phone number) against the impression metrics provided by the vendors to gauge other metrics such as engagement and potential sales. This will give you an optimal look at the campaign’s ROI and help you decide which channel is most valuable moving forward.
Combining Traditional and Digital Marketing to Make Valuable Campaigns
As with most things, neither traditional nor digital marketing are more important than the other in all instances. Deciding which route to take in the future depends on your company, audiences, goals, and results of past efforts. Likely, your future campaigns will be a blend of both, often referred to as integrated marketing. This approach is how most marketers look at strategies, seeing it as generating leads and sales inward by using the best of traditional and digital marketing activities.
Determining the best mix of the two that will generate optimal return on your activities can only be done through effective marketing analysis. In the end, it will help your company avoid future mistakes and overcome any potential problems in your strategic marketing plan.
While there are several tools available to support your team and help find and manage the best marketing activities and business development, the crew at WayPoint is well versed on navigating companies through everything, providing insights and setting them up for future success. Contact us to get started.
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