When it comes to marketing and growing a business most of us know the importance of specific and measurable goals. Perhaps you originally set out with goals in mind. You had a plan and were going to achieve your goals and conquer the world! However, you learned quickly that the path to success is long and winding with many variables. Maybe you found that interacting with ever-evolving consumers is difficult to keep up with. Or, perhaps you learned that influencing consumer behavior to attain your business goals has proven to be a long and difficult task.
Measuring your success is crucial to know whether you are on the right track to attain your goals, confirm that you’ve made progress or decide if it is time for a change. The most common term for measuring marketing performance is Return on Investment (or ROI), but it is not the only term. Most marketing campaigns have several measurement terms and abbreviations specific to each media used. Specific campaign goals can quickly make things more complicated as well. There’s CPA (cost per acquisition), CR (conversion rates), CPC (cost per click), CTR (click thru rate) and KPI (Key performance indicators), just to name a few. What do all these terms mean? What do you need to know to ensure your marketing campaigns are successful and provide a high return on investment?
There are many ways to track return on investment and monitor marketing efforts. If you are not seeing the response you desire, or enough of the responses you desire, it may be time to compare marketing tactics and methods to obtain a better ROI.
Past marketing performance doesn’t guarantee future performance or repeatability. Failure to have an exploratory budget to try new marketing methods, new target audiences, or simple changes to imagery and/or offers can be detrimental to marketing efforts. How consumers interact with media, how they are impacted by a message and/or offer will ALWAYS continue to change. Without the ability to try new marketing methods or messages, you will likely fall behind competitors that do experiment and continue to optimize their efforts.
If you are using multiple marketing tactics and media to reach and modify consumer behavior, you are likely facing an additional challenge – how to attribute responses to specific marketing efforts. There are many advanced measurement tools on the market today which can help measure and track responses from each media or message in your campaigns.
If your campaigns aren’t performing as you intended, it is time to ask yourself a difficult question- WHY! There are often multiple factors impacting the performance of campaigns. If you need a helping hand or a marketing professional to brainstorm with, Brand Ranch Media is here to help. Call us and together we can help evaluate your campaign goals, strategy, and responses to ensure your marketing efforts are on track and getting you the best ROI possible!
