The real objective is to guarantee a return on investment (ROI) with marketing performance management in the shortest possible timeframe. All strategic and tactical decisions must be measured against that standard.
More than anything, marketers need to adopt a new mindset and be ready to admit when the numbers contradict their expectations. Here are a few professional tips that could point you in the right direction and teach you how to spend your marketing budget more efficiently.
Marketing KPIs
Marketing KPIs are a set of data points that are used to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. They help marketers understand what they need to do to improve their campaigns and increase their ROI.
The most popular KPIs include:
– Reach – this is the number of people who have seen your content, whether it be on social media or through advertising
– Engagement – how many people engaged with your content by liking, commenting or sharing it
– Conversions – this is the number of conversions that resulted from your marketing campaign
These metrics may include the number of impressions, clicks, conversions, cost per conversion, etc. There are many different types of KPIs, but they all have one thing in common – they help marketers understand what is working and what isn’t.
Knowing your KPIs will allow you to measure your success and make changes accordingly.
Focus on the launch
The moment when your new product is first introduced to the market represents a great opportunity to make an impression. The window for action is very short, as dozens of other news items are competing for customers’ attention, so the initial kick off needs to be memorable and unique. It is smarter to concentrate the available financial resources and ensure the launch receives proper media attention than to spend the same amount over several weeks or months. Keep in mind that up to 50% of new products fail in some industries and be careful to provide sufficient marketing performance management support to give your newly released product a fighting chance. If you wait until the first results come in to start your offensive, it might already be too late to catch the momentum.
Multiplatform promotion
The message you send to the customers should be consistent, but media delivery should be as diverse and flexible as technical capacities allow. If you are using the traditional print and broadcast media, be sure to run a parallel digital campaign that reflects and builds upon the main themes seen on billboards and in TV commercials. Each additional channel will unlock another portion of the auditorium while reinforcing the message for the customers that already saw it elsewhere. Of course, it stands to reason that the message should be shaped differently for each group of customers, so your Facebook ads can be significantly more playful than your guest blog in a well-known online business publication.
Revenue breakdown
To put it simply, you need to know which marketing activities are responsible for creating sales leads in order to emphasize them in the future. Tracking the results of each ad and each promo event from month to month is a smart practice that allows businesses to understand their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s a simple exercise of efficiency, as well as a great source of input for financial planning in the future. For example, online gaming company analyzed the impact of the new feature they introduced – Strategy Simulator – and found out this page brings new clients to the site regularly. As you might guess, the company decided to invest some money to refine the feature and as a result saw its business expand very quickly. The message is clear – find out what works and do more of it.
Data Analytics
Once you start basing your decision on quantitative info, you’ll discover that you can dig much deeper if you have access to a set of specialized tools. Analytics software lets you track the performance of your online ads and other means of promotion very precisely, with projections changing as new data becomes available. Not only you can identify the underperforming sectors very easily in this way, raw data also hides the explanations why this is happening. If a manager combines natural understanding of the business with advanced analytics tools, he can control every marketing campaign or business investment from end to end and react immediately at the first sign of alarm.
Follow-up campaigns
Work doesn’t stop once the initial investment has been paid back. In fact, this is the point when it becomes possible for a company to chase big profits and start building a long-term foundation of the brand. Most successful performance marketing manager efforts need to be continued and expanded through new formats, keeping the product present in the public mind at all times. Using the same imagery and slogans (maybe in a slightly updated form) is a good practice that creates continuity and elicits recognition. The idea is to ‘strike while the iron is hot’ and take advantage of current demand for the product to collect as much revenues as possible before the market cools down.
