How Do You Know If Your Marketing Efforts Are Working?

Estimated Read time: 7 mins
How Do You Know If Your Marketing Efforts Are Working?

Did you know that 63% of businesses do not have a documented content strategy? Or that 69% of people bought something because of a tweet?

Don’t Stress. There is a Way to Know if Your Marketing Efforts Are Functioning.

After putting in hours, days, and even weeks of hard work and dedication to a full-fledged marketing campaign, there comes a time when as a marketing team, you must fully investigate if any of the tactics, objectives, and goals that were put in place provided any positive results. So, the question that needs to be answered is: How would you know if any of the marketing efforts you’ve worked so hard to enforce created good results?

Thankfully, there are methods marketing teams and professionals alike can implement. What makes a marketing campaign functional and makes us understand that our efforts have yielded a return on investment. When we make calculations to discover if we have gained an increase in the sales of our products and services, among other forms of financial gain, then we can conclude that our marketing strategies have been successful. Alternately, if we discover that specific marketing strategies did not help our businesses obtain financial gains, then marketing teams must create new strategies to obtain the goals which were initially set forth to achieve.

These reasons are what make measuring marketing efforts not just worthwhile but essential to the success of any marketing campaign.

What is Qualitative Data and Quantitative Data?

Measuring the success of marketing campaigns boils down to gathering all necessary materials, such as relevant numbers, details, and facts. Two essential types of data can tell marketers how well individual marketing efforts are functioning. These are quantitative and qualitative data.

Qualitative data is the type of data that measures and investigates the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions that a consumer has about a particular product or service. Its purpose is to obtain an understanding of the motivations and reasoning behind customer/client actions regarding specific products and services.

The other form of data that many marketers use to make firm conclusions about marketing efforts is quantitative data. This form of data tells us all about the numbers. When numerical information is obtained from a certain sample or group, this information is then gathered and provided to all interested parties, such as executives and other major stakeholders.

Quantitative data tells us the precise numerical information that is conducted in marketing efforts to measure campaign success such as SEO and related marketing metrics, financial statements, the number of subjects that attended trade shows, the number of consumers interviewed, among other measurable efforts that numerical data can provide. These two types of data can help marketers understand in great detail how marketing efforts are functioning, how to create measures that will improve on marketing tactics, and techniques to create a positive impact on your ROI.

Quantitative Efforts You Can Track

So, how can you track quantitative efforts? Many of the strategies that marketers and business leaders alike can utilize to obtain necessary quantitative data can be found in marketing metrics. When you can see measurable data, you can create sound decisions about how to move forward with the campaign. What exactly is the data that you should be looking for when measuring metrics? There is a considerable amount of data you can investigate, but there are some essential metrics any party involved in a marketing campaign can gather, thanks to prominent web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics and HubSpot. A great majority of businesses utilize a website and other online platforms to marketing their products and services.

Using your preferred analytics systems will provide you with a detailed update of how your online marketing efforts are stacking up. An analytics program can tell you about your search engine referrals or online traffic, by tracking the keywords consumers use to search for and find your business, as well as to tell you information about which search engines were utilized. As you can see, compiling campaign metrics utilizing analytics can provide marketers with numerical information that can reveal if the strategies that were implemented are currently functioning.

You can also obtain data on the amount of conversions your business is able to obtain from marketing campaign strategies. Some of these conversions include leaving links, such as blog posts, in your website content, to refer customers to your company’s landing page. The landing page is usually the last stop where customers make decisions about purchasing a product or service. By analyzing conversions, you can create changes to your content and other marketing strategies to ensure your campaign ROI. Other ways you can analyze quantitative data is by investigating your website’s bounce rate, which is the number of visitors who leave your website without navigating it any further and analyzing individual visits, which is a customer’s first visit to a website as well as all other visits by the same customer.

Qualitative Efforts You Can Track

As previously mentioned, qualitative efforts can tell us about a customer’s points of view, perceptions, feelings about a certain product or service. Qualitative data can be analyzed in a variety of ways. There are certain techniques that will discover what goes through the mind of a customer. This method can be used to gather the impressions that a customer has regarding your product or services through direct observation. This technique can involve looking over customers (also known as subjects) to study their behaviors and other actions through video recording and other tactics, such as a one-way mirror.

Other ways you can gather impressions about products and services include conducting focus groups, where customers can analyze a product, and then discuss it with other consumers for greater insight. Focus groups can help businesses understand elements of a product and what conclusions customers gather about a particular product, such as the usage of a product, the packaging of a product, and how the design and copy affect how consumers see a product.

A similar technique to receive product impressions includes analyzing in-home videos to see how consumers utilize your product in their own personal environment. Shopping with consumers also helps businesses obtain vital information on how consumers react to your particular product where an honest opinion can be gathered. Lastly, individual interviews can be of great assistance to businesses. By conducting interviews, researchers can create a series of specific, open-ended questions that tell the researcher, and ultimately the business, what exactly motivates a consumer to purchase your products.

How Do You Know If Your Marketing Efforts Are Working? Content Strategy

Ways To Measure Marketing Effectiveness

Did you know that 63% of businesses do not have a documented content strategy? Or that 69% of people bought something because of a tweet? Did you also know that 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative? These important facts tell us how crucial creating an effective marketing campaign is for the success of a business. Ensuring that your marketing campaigns find success brings with it a duty to investigate thoroughly the current state of each campaign. This can only be accomplished by discovering the effectiveness of each campaign. By knowing how marketing campaigns are functioning, we can make wiser decisions and decide how to move forward with the knowledge obtained.

Consider analyzing data relating to your website’s organic traffic, as well as bounce rate, conversion rates, and also considering how your current website content is functioning. If social media tactics have been implemented, investigate your brand’s social media engagement stats, and discover which social media platforms are having the most influence regarding business sales. Financial information such as business sales and calculating certain costs can help determine if campaign efforts were successful. It is also important to analyze data that tells us about the behavior of consumers.

Implement techniques such as creating focus groups, conducting interviews, and documenting consumer interactions with your products or services through in-home videos. Utilizing a combination of all techniques, behavioral and analytical, will help to make the best decisions on how to move forward with marketing campaigns. By doing so, marketers and other professionals involved will be certain that everything possible is being done in order to ensure that business goals, including financial goals, are being met.

You, Too, Can Implement the Right Strategies to Calculate How Your Marketing Efforts Are Influencing Your Campaigns

Have you implemented strategies to help your marketing campaigns find success, but have found that the strategies do not bring the best returns on investment? At b.iD, we can find the best solutions to help your organization’s marketing campaigns achieve your business goals by carefully analyzing which tactics are having a positive or negative effect and help your campaign get back on track as quickly as possible. Call b.iD. Email Us. Send a quick message today. We can’t wait to hear from you!