The point of marketing strategies is that at the end you can reveal to stakeholders what your efforts and the company's money has achieved through the specific marketing strategy. Without results, your strategy is just another possible topic at a budget cut meeting!
It is imperative that you know what your ROI is on any marketing tools you use as this will give you a good indication of the success of your campaign. This information can also help you realize that perhaps a specific marketing tool you thought was great for your product / service, might not be the right one.
We are also very aware that if you have been given the task of marketing the business / company, and maybe this is not your area of expertise, that you will need to show the big bosses where the money has gone (the scary stuff).
You need to always decide, before you compile your strategy, what your main goal is. Are you looking for likes, website visits, purchases, competition entries, newsletter subscriptions? Think about what your end goal is and this information will help you to know which results to draw from your marketing tools success / failure.
Some tools even ask for your end goal before you start your campaign so that they can suggest specific reports to look at once the campaign has come to an end.
This is arguably the most difficult part of the marketing process, how to visualize your results so that everyone, including the big boss, can understand where the money went and what results the strategy brought.
ALWAYS keep in mind that marketing does not always mean sales. Your strategy can, for example, be about brand awareness or brand trust and if that brings in sales then great, but if it just brings in more brand awareness and trust then your strategy has been successful (This is sometimes difficult to explain to shareholders) .
Why do we say “right now”? because there are tools popping up daily that can better analyse or visualise your results and maybe give you better looking visuals, so we are just looking at the best tools as of today.
For your online strategies / campaigns that lead to your website or online shop this is definitely the best tool to use. The reporting function, your best friend as a marketer, has great ways to visualize your results and keep track of them as the strategy is playing out. No need to try to find the best way to display the figures. Best part? There is a free version of the platform, you only pay if you want more advance features / reports.
First step: add the line of code, provided by Google Analytics, to each of your website pages.
For organic and sponsored posts / adverts on Facebook and Instagram, they have a tool built inside the platform called Insights. Here you can pretty much get any information you need but a good practice would be to always link your Facebook / Instagram advert to your Google Analytics account as well as this will show you your conversions (someone sees your Instagram advert, clicks link to website, clicks on an item on website, purchases the item).
So your results will show your advert had a conversion: whatever a conversion means for that specific campaign - sale, newsletter signup, page like etc.
Google Ads also has built-in tools that show you your results and conversions. Keep in mind that to track a conversion you need to be able to put a line of code (that Google Ads provides you with) into the webpage where the conversion happens.
f your product/service happens to be sold on a website that you do not own, you will need to ask them to add the line of code to your pages on their site (this is not always possible, which means you cannot track conversions - this is not ideal).
Focus groups is a well know method of getting feedback and is necessary for non-digital campaigns. For example, You have a billboard up on a specific highway for a month and then you recruit 50 people who drive that highway daily to find out if they saw the advert and if they did see the advert how did it influence them?
Surveys can be physical or digital, allowing you to reach a bigger audience for feedback.
TIP: Keep the focus group / survery short and offer a reward for participating - voucher, promotional item etc as this encourages people to take part and give constructive feedback.
Always wrap your strategy up with a write up of “lessons learnt” which should include platforms, spend, wording, keywords, target audience and other topics. This is to avoid making the same mistakes in the future and can be used as a training tool for new employees.
-Geena Kolbe, September 2020
