Investing money into an online marketing campaign can be daunting, especially when you are a small business.
Never fall into the trap of spending your budget on big marketing campaigns without measuring whether they bring a good return on investment for your business.
It is possible to monitor the success of each of your online marketing campaigns. But you first need to know the right way to go about it. Here is a guide on how to ensure your marketing campaigns are a consistent success.
Understand What Success Means
To figure out if your marketing campaign has been successful, you need to precisely establish what that term ‘success’ means to you and your business.
Defining what success means will enable you to focus on a particular business goal. Because in today’s world, a successful marketing campaign must be laser-targeted and fully aligned to your broader business goals.
The more specific the goal, the stronger your campaign will be, and the easier it will be to focus on turning it into a success.
For example, targeting a top 3 ranking on a particular keyword is a far better goal for your small business than a generic campaign to increase your search engine presence.
Using Metrics In Your Marketing Campaigns
The beauty of promoting on the internet is that you have a banquet of analytics tools at your disposal to support your marketing efforts. Analytics tools provide the ability to track campaign success rates at the click of the button.
Of course, you first need to know what you are tracking and how. That will help you figure out the type of tools you need to use and how best to monitor your campaign.
In the next section, we’ll look at some of the most common types of marketing campaigns and how you can properly measure their success.
Types Of Marketing Campaigns and How To Measure Them
If you read up on ways to market yourself on the internet, you’ll find thousands of hits on Google. However, as a small business is it worth following in the footsteps of other startups.
Here are the five most popular marketing campaigns that you can consider to help grow your business:
Traffic and SEO Campaigns
Whatever stage your business is in, one of the most common business goals is to hit a particular traffic number on your website.
Before seeking out SEO services, spend time thinking about what traffic success means to you because not all traffic is equal.
A high-end jewelry designer, for example, isn’t looking for millions of hits to their website from people looking for low-priced costume jewelry.
Work on building an SEO campaign that brings you closer to a specific goal. For example, a high-end jewelry designer might want a top 3 Google ranking for the keyword ‘unique designer jewelry’.
That will give you a clear marker as to whether your campaign was a success.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Effective email marketing campaigns are crucial to small businesses. Did you know that the average email campaign brings a $42 return for every dollar spent?
If you are running email marketing campaigns, it’s straightforward to check how successful you were. But you will need to look at more than just the raw metrics, such as the number of email recipients.
Track email open rates, click-through rates, and conversions (click to purchase) to get a full picture of how successful that campaign was.
Checking these statistics across each email will also help you see the type of copy and call to action and subject headings your audience responded well to. That is going to help you when creating future campaigns.
New Lead Campaigns
If you are a small startup, one of the first campaigns you might choose to run is a promotion to grow your email list. That will allow you to acquire your first lucrative business leads.
A successful lead campaign will measure what conversion rates you get from people who see your promotion. What percentage of landing page visitors sign up? And what percentage abandon the page entirely?
You’ll want to look at metrics such as the number of clicks you are getting to your promotional landing page and the number of sign-up conversions from that page.
You might also be interested in looking into what traffic sources drive the best conversion rate if you promote your campaign to multiple marketing channels.
eCommerce Sales Campaigns
If you are an eCommerce business, the metric you probably want to target will be your sales conversions. But other metrics will be of interest to you if you want to know how successful each campaign was.
For example, how many people clicked on the product you were promoting? How many of those people added it to their basket?
Did you provide an upsell? If so, how many people opted to add that upsell product at the checkout stage?
There are plenty of marketing case studies for eCommerce brands that have experienced a successful marketing campaign. In most cases, these businesses followed clear metrics to show their campaign success.
Brand Awareness Campaigns
If you want to increase the reach of your brand, track a set of soft metrics. That will provide a snapshot of your brand’s performance.
Measuring your followers on social media is the most obvious place to start when it comes to brand awareness. But take time to measure the levels of engagement you are getting on social media too.
You can also use tools to help track social media conversations to see how frequently people mention your brand online.
Make Marketing Campaigns Work For Your Business
Before you consider marketing online, get knowledgeable on the options open to you and what constitutes success for your small business.
By doing that, you stand a much better chance of pursuing the right marketing campaigns and for all the right reasons.
Let us guide you on what marketing campaigns are best for your business. We can show you how we can provide you with support from a digital marketing agency that will help you get a great return on your investment.
To start, complete this simple form to tell us about your business and your project, and we’ll do the rest from there.
