Tracking the results of your Marketing Communication (marcom) program is as important as planning and implementing your program. Marcom metrics yield tangible information on how audiences react to and act on your messages. In today’s post, we outline which metrics to track, and how evaluating the results can help you continually sharpen the focus of your plan.
Important Metrics to Track
Determining which metrics are most beneficial to your organization will help optimize the time and resources needed for measuring responses. Base your determination on the mediums you use to distribute your messages, including e-mail blasts, press releases, landing pages and even print ads.
Digital Metrics
The Digital Age brought about more interactive and instantaneous ways of distributing and tracking marcom messages. Content Marketing Institute lists these key digital metrics, and the questions they answer:
- Unique Visitors – “How many individual people are visiting our website?”
- Page Views – “How many times is a particular web page being viewed?”
- Search Engine Traffic – “How many visitors to our site are finding us on Google, Bing, Yahoo and the like?”
- Bounce Rate – “What number of visitors left our site immediately after visiting?”
- Conversion Rate – What number of visitors take a specific call-to-action (subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a technical paper, signing up for e-mail alerts, ect.)?
- Inbound Links – How many times have other sources included links to your website on their own content?
Pro Tip: Linking to internal web pages in your external communications, such as press releases or newsletters, will increase the chances of links to your site being published.
Print Metrics
Despite the rise of digital marketing tactics in recent years, there is still value in advertising in relevant print publications. Tracking impressions from print ads can be a bit challenging, but it is certainly not impossible.
- Using scanable QR codes or unique URLs on your print ads can help you track the publication used to access your site.
- Including an inbound phone number on your print ad gives the reader the option to reach out for more information, and another way for you to measure response to your ad.
- Offering a promotional item or service discount, if possible, to readers who call and mention your print ad helps draw attention to your product or service and allows you to track responses.
Evaluation and Planning: “Okay… Now What?”
The purpose of measuring marketing metrics is to track how responsive your intended audience was to different messages, and what specific channels yielded the best results. How your messages perform over time should determine the direction of your next marcom plan.
- Graphing or charting the results of your campaigns makes for easier evaluation, so you’re not drowning in a sea of numbers. Software such as Google Analytics can collect and chart metrics for you, over whatever period of time you wish to evaluate.
- Comparing sales and inquiry statistics before, during and after implementation of your marcom plan will give a good window into what effect your tactics had on company performance. It is good practice to evaluate your metrics on a weekly and/or monthly basis, should you need to revise your marcom plan as it progresses.
- Tracking specific metrics for each ad placed or link embedded can help fine-tune future marketing endeavors. For example, if your link on Website A garnered more impressions than the one on Website B, you’ll know which site is more likely to get you more responses for your next marcom plan.
- Analyzing conversation and bounce rates is key to determining the level of interest of your audience. So if more members from Audience X e-mailed you to follow up on your digital ad than those from Audience Y, you can determine which website is worth advertising on going forward.
Things change quickly in the marketing world. What works for gaining audience impressions today may be outdated six months from now as new channels rise in popularity. Regularly measuring the results of your marcom plans helps ensure you are making the most of your marketing dollar, and help you stay ahead of the ever-winding curve of marketing tactics.