Recently updated on August 28th, 2024 at 09:38 am
Marketing activities need to have a clearly defined objective. Without knowing what the purpose of your marketing activities are, you won’t be able to know which metrics to analyse to know whether the activities were successful or not. Marketing objectives can be defined by inspecting the types of content you’re promoting.
By using the three stages of The Marketing Funnel as a basis you can begin to define your marketing objectives.
Awareness
To build awareness marketers should aim to promote top of the funnel content. This type of content should be ungated and easily accessible to all audiences. Typical examples of top of the funnel content include thought leadership pieces and company information. Promotional videos that showcase your business’ products or services can be very effective for generating brand awareness. These types of content keep your audience informed about your company and brand.
Consideration
When driving consideration marketers should promote middle of the funnel content. This is typically gated content, requiring an action that allows you to gather more information about your leads. Case studies, white papers or webinars can be used to collect contact information to retarget prospects later on, helping nurture leads further down the funnel. Lead Gen Forms on your website or LinkedIn serve as the gate behind which the middle of the funnel content is kept and are very effective means of gathering first-party data. By promoting a Single Image Ad marketers can drive prospects toward the Lead Gen Form.
Conversion
When the goal is to drive conversions it is vital to have a clear call-to-action (CTA) and a follow-up plan. Potential leads regularly forget where or how they shared their information with you if you don’t follow up with them in 30 days. Nurturing leads effectively requires marketers to continuously keep them in the loop. Automation offers many opportunities to streamline this process. Perhaps a marketer promotes a Single Image Ad for a live demo of the service. This can target people who have visited the company website before to encourage them down the funnel toward conversion. When someone signs up for the demo they must receive a follow up communication, this is often done in the form of an automated mailer.
The Next Step – Measurement
Once the objectives of the marketing activities are defined the next step is to consider how to measure the activities. If the goal is to build awareness, you want your audience to know you exist and remember your brand. How do you know if this is happening? At this point the relevant metrics are impressions and video views, which help you understand if your content is resonating with the audience. To keep track of the financial impact on your business you’ll want to measure CPM (Cost Per Thousand) and CPV (Cost Per View). Reach gives you an indication of how many users have seen your content.
The metrics that are usually used to measure improved brand sentiment are social engagements (likes, shares and comments) and ad clicks. These indicators show you how people respond to your content and help designers optimise toward the best performing content. Video views measure your audience’s intention to watch the whole of your video.
To measure the impact of thought leadership marketing and brand consideration you can reference the number of posts you publish and the number of followers your page has.
Now that people are aware of your existence, you want them to get to know you better and increase their engagement with your content. How can you measure this? By keeping track of the number of visitors you have to your website and the conversions on your website (sales for eCommerce, B2C; submitted forms, downloads or event enrollments for B2B). Additional metrics you can analyse are the time spent on pages and the bounce rate.
If the objective is to increase action and engagement marketers can check metrics such as: clicks, CTR, likes, shares, comments, video completion rate or number of followers. To further understand your audience segments you can check the website demographics.
At the bottom of the funnel the objective is to generate leads, convert them into customers and retain their business. The basic metrics digital marketers analyse are: number of leads, cost per conversion and the conversion rate. However, the quality of the leads always beats the quantity. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are those which the marketing team has identified as more likely to convert based on web pages visited, content downloaded, CTA’s clicked and social networking posts interacted with. Other good metrics to measure at this stage of the funnel are the customer lifetime value and the customer acquisition cost.
When it comes to converting and retaining customers it is important to look at the cost per lead but other valuable metrics include: transaction value / revenue, renewals and customer lifetime value.
There are a multitude of metrics you can look at when reporting on your marketing activities. It is vitally important to identify the ones that are relevant to your objectives and not get lost in the noise. Staying focused on the insights provided by the data and refining the strategy and content over time is key to success.
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