The data you gather from your marketing performance management software tell a story – a snapshot that shows how well your marketing operations are helping your brand conquer its challenges. Make sure that story has a happy ending by using that data to align your marketing strategy with your company’s overall business goals.
In today’s data-driven world, there’s no place for siloed marketing. The vision that Mad Men portrayed, with its creative team off in its own world, dreaming up catchy ads for creativity’s sake, won’t cut it in the 21st century.
Today’s customers demand experiences that revolve around them. Customer experience drives revenue – and revenue is a big part of the ROI equation.
To find out whether your marketing campaigns create the kinds of experiences that drive revenue, marketing teams need to measure performance, not creativity. Your bottom line is the ultimate measure of customer experience.
Surprisingly, research shows that brands only use marketing analytics 40% of the time when making decisions.
Image via Statista
That needs to change. An easy-to-use marketing performance measurement tool can help you up that percentage considerably.
Performance-based marketing makes ROI the measure of how well your marketing campaigns connect with customers. Using industry benchmarks and historical ROI, marketing performance software spits out a no-frills story of how well your campaigns did towards achieving your corporate goals.
Using that data, your marketing leadership team can put their heads together to tweak your content strategy and come up with a detailed plan more likely to hit your target ROI.
Measure All Your Marketing Successes
Measuring your success in all the interim steps that eventually lead to a purchase decision, such as email subscriptions, ebook downloads, and free product trials, can help you nail down where your marketing performance shines and where it lags.
It’s not just those points of conversion that you should measure. It’s also the increased traffic that leads to increased numbers of subscriptions and downloads, the numbers of qualified leads that your social media content attracts that ultimately drive conversions. If it’s relevant to revenue, you need to measure it. Relevant metrics also can include:
- Brand awareness
- Engagement, including time on site, subscriptions, and downloads
- Lead generation, including free trials and consultations
- Sales
- Customer retention (and negatively, churn)
- Customer brand advocacy
Measure What You Spend To Get There
For every success, there’s a cost. If that cost exceeds the benefits of the victory, it’s not a success at all.
That’s why your marketing performance software needs to measure what you spend to achieve each goal. Again, the more detailed the information, the more accurate the insights you’ll glean.
Trimming costs is as critical to your corporate success as gaining more happy customers. Tie every outcome to a cost, and you can see areas in which you can cut out the fat without endangering your growth.
For example, if you discover that although your TV ads attract the attention of your target audience, the price you pay for them doesn’t justify the meager traffic they bring to your website. At that point, your leadership team might look at more profitable alternatives – and why they might work better.
You might discover that clickable ads on popular YouTube videos bring in an insane amount of traffic compared to their cost. That hypothesis makes sense since people watching your ads on TV must either write down your website’s URL or search for it online – too much work for today’s “I want it now” audiences.
So, you might decide to pour more money into the YouTube ads. Then, you’d watch your marketing analytics numbers closely to see if the numbers indicate that your hypothesis is on the right track.
Align Your Marketing Budget with Your Top Revenue Generators
Today’s marketing performance software can measure all the touchpoints along your marketing funnel. With that information, you can see which channels, pieces of content, and marketing campaigns bring the most bang for your marketing buck.
Let’s say your content analytics show that while Facebook brings in a lot of followers, your real revenue generator is LinkedIn. Twitter, on the other hand, hardly registers.
Digging in deeper, you discover that Facebook is a great source of top-of-the-funnel traffic, but where they do their real growing in trust is in your solution-focused LinkedIn posts. From there, they engage even more with your brand, joining your email list, downloading white papers, and requesting a consultation with your sales team, and eventually, becoming customers.
Use those numbers to allocate your budget money. In this case, you’d probably drop paid advertising on Twitter and simply set your Facebook posts to post to Twitter automatically to catch any stragglers.
Then, you’d pour money into creating paid top-of-the-funnel posts on Facebook, while you’d put your top-tier content producers into creating valuable content on LinkedIn, your email newsletter, and white papers.
Keeping on top of your marketing ROI by frequent measurement allows you to identify promising new sources of revenue generation, as well as areas in which spending is increasing without a corresponding increase in revenue.
Use Marketing Performance Analytics To Motivate Your Teams
The benefits of marketing performance software extend well beyond the macro level. They can also motivate your team members to boost their individual performance.
Providing your marketing teams with specific criteria for what constitutes success gives them concrete goals to shoot for. For example, your marketing performance analytics might show that blog posts about one of your key topics are consistently missing the mark in driving conversions.
Task your teams with conducting an audit of content that deals with that topic. They might find, for instance, that the information it cites is too general or outdated. Or, perhaps the keywords they use within the content don’t align with your target audience’s searches.
With a few revisions, they can get the poorly performing content back on track. And, they will have a concrete goal to shoot for in future content about the same topic.
Similarly, if your numbers indicate that your spending on creating videos is going up while the results remain static, you can engage in content collaboration with your teams to find ways to reduce costs. Perhaps your teams aren’t reusing props, or maybe they’re hiring top-name actors when an up-and-comer would do just as well – or even better since they’re looking for a break.
Pull It All Together with Customized Marketing Content Measurement
To align your operations with both your internal teams’ and corporate goals, you need a content marketing platform that easily integrates with your marketing performance software to sync data. And, it helps if that platform can manage large multi-channel campaigns, associating individual pieces of content to each campaign.
Finally, you need a content measurement solution customized to your company’s exact needs, one that includes both internal reporting and external performance numbers. DivvyHQ has all those features – and so many more. Discover what DivvyHQ can do for your marketing performance. Start your free 14-day free trial today!