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While social media and content marketing are integral to boost leads and revenue for a business, they rarely exist in a vacuum. More often, the past topics of discussion this week are elements of a larger, cross-channel marketing campaign. So how can a marketer predict success of a muti-faceted integrated marketing campaign?
Today, we’re ending our weeklong series on planning for and predicting the success of your marketing campaigns by talking about how to predict marketing success across channels.
Begin With Strong Goals
The foundation of any successful cross-channel campaign is a strong, measurable goal around which all tactics align. Whether it’s increasing leads by 20% in the next year or bringing in a set amount of new revenue, a goal that is specific, measurable, and timely will set up any marketer with the base they need to measure their future success.
This goal needs to translate seamlessly across all elements of the campaign. Social media, lead generation, content and design (as well as any other facet of the campaign) need to align tactics and execution to maximize their contribution to the larger goal, so be sure that marketing managers all understand how and why their individual activities contribute.
Measure Indirect Impact
We’ve talked before about the difficulty of measuring marketing’s direct impact on sales and revenue, which is why it’s more important than ever to determine how you plan to measure marketing outputs before a campaign even starts. It’s probably most pressing for you to measure the direct and indirect impact your campaigns have on revenue, but keep your eyes out for effects on other metrics as well, including the length of the sales cycle, percentage of MQLs that become SQLs and total revenue per lead.
Think Long-Term
However important a data-based campaign goal is, it’s not the end of the line for top-performing marketers. A marketing campaign needs to have continuing effects after it’s over, and as you craft a cross-channel campaign, think about the long-term impact your marketing has. Will it continue to bring in new leads or revenue? How long will a piece of content remain relevant, and what platforms will extend its life? How can you expect the effects to diminish over time?
Not only does thinking long-term allow you to predict the ultimate impact of your work, it also helps you maximize short-term operations to have a lasting effect. Figure out what you need your campaign’s resonance to be six months to a year from its end date, and structure your plans in order to meet those requirements.
Let us know: how are you gearing up for your next big campaign?
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
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The outcomes of content marketing are difficult to measure, and they’re even harder to predict. Great content has the potential to draw in new leads and revenue, but we all know that these objectives aren’t always achieved. Some content just works, while the rest falls flat or fails to achieve the desired outcomes.
So how is a marketer to plan a successful content marketing campaign? Is trial and error the only option?
Thankfully, it’s not. Whether you’re working with blogs, webinars or whitepapers, you can predict the success of your content strategy. You just need to tap into data and analytics to develop an empirical understanding of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to content and plan a campaign with predictable, measurable outcomes.
Understand Your Audience and Customers
We spend a lot of time getting to know our customers’ buying habits and preferences, but we need to make sure that almost as much effort is spent researching the content preferences of our audiences. The audience for your content is probably made up of a large percentage of potential customers, but it also likely includes some thought leaders, advocates and current customers. The best content will feel like it speaks to each of these audiences directly.
As we said on Monday, look into what content your audience both creates and appreciates. A crowd that’s active on social media and used to digesting short bits of information may react well to a one-pager on your company’s point of difference, but a dense e-book might not work. However, if you’ve got a more niche audience that’s hungry for more in-depth content (and can’t find it anywhere else), such an e-book may be the thing that turns your leads into customers.
Target the Best Content to the Best People
In December of 2014, we spoke about how the internet has increased the amount of readily-available content, and as a result, the quality of work has decreased as marketers use quantity to get their message across. Today, it’s important to use data and analytics to target quality content toward the right people to ensure that they get appropriate content at the right time. Craft plenty of different content to meet the needs of different segments of your audience, but don’t sacrifice quality, and allow data to tell you what they need.
Let Data Create Compelling Stories
The best marketers understand that content needs to tell a story. It needs to describe an audience’s pain points and provide a solution. In order to craft compelling stories, use data to identify the pain points that potential customers are experiencing and develop content around that. Using data to focus content around your audience’s needs as opposed to your services lets you work off an established data point instead of simply trying to see how well the audience engages with a feature of your business. With this approach, you’ll be able to better predict the rate of engagement and effectiveness of your content.
Let us know: how do you use data to plan your content?
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Is your brand effectively harnessing data insights to improve its social media marketing?
Digital marketing is full of opportunities to apply such insights to improve ROI, but too many brands still don’t use data effectively.
By focusing on the necessary metrics and KPIs, your team can determine the projected ROI of a social media campaign and discuss how to ensure strategy and tactics are aligned with these predictions. Start with these metrics:
Engagement
Likes, shares and retweets really do matter to your business. These interactions are both an important source of data and an avenue for greater brand reach. Follow engagement over time with tools including Facebook Page Insights and Twitter Analytics.
In addition to the number of interactions, pay close attention to what content your followers appreciate. Segment the insights by demographics. Use data from past campaigns to project the success of your next one and to better target your message to the audience you want to reach.
Conversions
Social media campaigns may aim to lead directly to new purchases, or they may focus on raising brand awareness. Choose specific goals when creating a new campaign. Based on the campaign’s goals, decide what counts as a conversion. Is it a purchase? A request for more information?
Again, look to related past campaigns to set goals and strategy. Then, plan tactics. Create specific social media content based on your goals for the campaign and past performance. These may include targeted offers, educational content and more.
These are just two of the many social media metrics your brand can measure and use to create great campaigns. Come back Wednesday and Friday to learn more about how data and insights can improve B2B marketing campaigns.
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Data can help predict success, but can it also prevent failure? Today, we will discuss how far data predictions can go in keeping your marketing on track, and how they can help marketers avoid potential roadblocks or problems in a campaign.
Look at Past Work
The most important — and easiest — way to use data for predicting potential difficulties is by looking at past operations and roadblocks. You may find that some of the mistakes you’ve made are actually habits, and seeing the data can help you identify and fix them before they enter your next campaign.
Study Your KPIs
On Wednesday, we discussed different metrics that lend themselves toward predictability. By using these, you’ll be better equipped to move over roadblocks and stay on track. However, it’s not a bad idea to use multiple KPIs in tandem to see where you may have roadblocks in the future. For example, if you’re implementing a new keyword strategy in your next campaign and see that a certain phrase doesn’t resonate with your target audience, think about how you can convey that idea in a different way.
Prioritize
What may seem like a roadblock at the moment may only be a slight hiccup to your overall campaign. If you’re focused on revenue, a dip in social media interaction isn’t going to be the end of the world, so ensure that you’re prioritizing operations so that you’re staying aligned to main goals, not secondary tactics.
Communicate with Other Departments
You need to be able to communicate with other departments, especially sales, to ensure that your operations are setting them up for success. Oftentimes, a roadblock stemming from a marketing issue doesn’t appear until further into the sales cycle. Make sure that you’re well aware of how other departments operate and what their main needs are so you can predictably provide them with a steady flow of quality leads.
Let us know: how are you avoiding future roadblocks in your marketing?
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In order to create predictable marketing campaigns, it’s necessary to build on an existing foundation of data. As a marketer, you need to be able to look back on the successes and failures of past campaigns to determine how to maximize your marketing time and spend in the future.
However, you can do better than that. If you’re a marketer who wants to ensure that your department is a key business driver, you can and should forecast your metrics to provide insight into likely financial outcomes of your marketing efforts. Today, we are looking at three ways marketers like you can forecast your next campaign.
Revenue-Based Metrics
There’s a good chance that your business already has a revenue goal for the next quarter or month. By aligning your forecasting with business growth goals, you’ll be able to prove your contribution and perhaps more importantly, set yourself up for maximum growth. A strong metric to forecast is average revenue per sale, which marketing can influence by changing targeting strategies and tactics.
Sales-Based Metrics
Lenskold Group’s 2011 Marketing ROI Study found that among the 77% of marketers who were forecasting metrics, those who tracked sales opportunities reported higher company growth overall. However, revenue isn’t the only way to track how marketing influences sales. Ensure you are tracking multi-touch attribution of leads and noting how marketing has contributed to the development of sales qualified leads (SQLs). Multi-touch attribution is, at its core, an attempt to outline the buyer’s journey through data. Building a system that allows you to see if and how your marketing efforts have reached a lead, and how marketing is working to move them down the funnel toward sales won’t just help you understand how your marketing campaigns are performing today. It will also help you plan for the future.
Influence Metrics
Measuring opportunity influence can be difficult: it involves determining how previous touches from multiple departments have influenced a lead’s movement down the funnel, and the numbers can become inflated if not handled properly. However, when this information is used appropriately, it can be a great tool to help you see how players from various areas of your company are influencing buyers’ decisions in the past, present and future.
There’s no doubt that choosing which KPIs to monitor can be difficult. While it’s easy to consistently measure the same things, taking a step back and setting up KPIs that allow you to understand current performance and forecast future results will give you a leg up in delivering value and demonstrating your ROI.
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When your team designs a strategy for an upcoming campaign, do you rely on data-driven predictions? Doing so can be helpful as you work to understand the market climate, outline a strategy and begin tracking outputs.
But you also have to ask yourself, are the predictions you’re working with accurate? Thorough data analysis will pay out in dividends. While many analytics tools offer a free look at marketing performance, an experienced data analyst can better interpret what these numbers mean. Then, your team can use these insights to predict future marketing performance and prepare new strategies.
When planning your next campaign, leverage data-driven predictions to:
Evaluate Market Climate
Compare data from both internal and external sources when evaluating market climate. This may include market research by outside firms or government sources. Also use tools such as Google Adwords and Compete.com to learn about how consumers engage with others in your industry. By considering information from all these types of sources together, your data analysts can gain a better understanding of the market as a whole.
Use Past Data to Outline a Strategy
Your organization can use the data from past campaigns to guide current strategy and set accurate KPIs. Considering multiple campaigns will give you a good idea of marketing performance over time. Brainstorm a few possible approaches to your next campaign. Then, use the data to evaluate each strategic plan and choose the best.
Track Output
Prior to beginning your campaign, set realistic marketing goals based on analysis of past campaigns. Use your data insights to project progress toward these goals. Once the campaign has launched, measure results alongside these predictions.
How closely do your results match your expectations? The new marketing value chain offers marketers more tools to achieve marketing predictability than ever before, but individual campaigns will still vary in performance. Remain nimble in your approach as you gather insights into what’s working this time.
Data-driven predictions can make the difference between marketing success and failure. Use these insights to drive decisions for your next campaign.
Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
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This month on the blog, we are focusing our content on using data to plan future marketing campaigns. Today, we’re beginning this discussion with a basic overview of the traits of data and analytics that make them such important tools in campaign planning.
Objective
At the UX Poland Conference, presenter Jeff Parks said “without research, businesses cannot make informed decisions.” Within the marketing department, this still rings true: as a marketing leader, it’s imperative to look at your past performance history to make informed decisions for the future.
When planning for a new campaign, it’s easy to plan with your heart as much as with your head. Instead of developing strategy around what you see as your marketing department’s strongest suits, use past data to determine what successful operations you’ve executed on in the past that have given you the best and most consistent outcomes. What you think is working and what is actually working may or may not overlap, but data doesn’t lie: you may find that your copywriter’s brilliant content doesn’t actually contribute to your overall goals, while the SEO strategy you thought was underwhelming actually pushed through a steady stream of new leads. Use data as an objective starting ground for ensuring that your next operations are contributing as effectively as possible to your overarching objectives.
Insightful
Data and analytics provide insight to elements of your marketing campaign that aren’t always immediately present. In B2B marketing, look into data to glean insights that will help not only improve your marketing operations but also help the sales team seal the deal with a marketing-qualified lead. For example, use lead-mapping tactics to help sales teams better predict lead behavior and anticipate questions or areas of pushback those leads may have in the sales process. Not only will this streamline the entire marketing-sales process, but it will improve your ability to move leads through your pipeline and turn them into customers — and doing this through data-based resources allows you to easily share how your marketing impacts the company’s bottom line.
Predictable
Data doesn’t lie, and it opens up new truths about how your marketing operations truly impact your audience. This is powerful information, and it allows you to predict how your campaign will run. From the anticipated outcomes of reworked tactics to predicted revenue attributed to your department, data lets you make informed projections about how your marketing operations will impact the company.
This predictability isn’t just nice to have: it’s essential to show your value as a marketer and demonstrate the impact your operations have on the rest of the company. And even if you find that your predictions are incorrect, by re-analyzing that data, you’ll uncover important insights into your operations.
Tune in next week as we discuss how to maximize accuracy in your data-driven campaign predictions; determining the most important KPIs for an upcoming project; and using data to manage or even deflect roadblocks before they occur. In the meantime, let us know: how does data help you organize and plan your upcoming marketing campaigns?
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As we wrap up our discussion of the new marketing value chain and ROI, let’s take a moment to reflect back on why it’s essential that marketers prove their ROI in this day and age. According to the 2014 CMO Survey, more CMOs than ever feel the pressure from company leaders to prove marketing’s impact on the company’s bottom line, but they’re not able to prove the impact of their operations: for example, only 13% of firms were able to quantitatively prove the impact of social media marketing. It’s clear that a data and analytics-based approach that tracks quantifiable results of marketing operations is the solution to this disconnect.
Next month, we’ll be focusing our blog topics around how marketers can not only communicate their successes, but plan for the future with predictable, data-centered marketing strategies. Today, let’s get down to the basics of planning future marketing campaigns and discuss why the new marketing value chain helps marketing leaders as they prepare for the future.
Data-Driven Strategy
You have a wealth of information at your fingertips: from social media follows, likes and comments to your leads’ email addresses and telephone numbers. However, creating a high-level plan for your operations requires sifting through this data to find out what’s most important for helping your company achieve its overall objectives.
Communicate to company leaders that you’re using data to first get a strong, objective overview of the company’s current position in the market, and then explain how your strategy will bolster this position. Use our suggested KPIs to illustrate how you intend to boost the company through marketing positions and track data over time to predict how your strategy will make an impact.
Predictable Tactics
The marketing strategy you develop around analytics relies on the raw data you receive as a result of your tactical operations. Track these tactics over time to see, for example, where your Twitter applause rate has historically landed, and analyze particularly well-performing tweets to understand what content your audience enjoys. By engaging in this kind of analysis, you set yourself up with the data needed to make informed predictions about the success of your ongoing operations.
Accountability
By structuring your strategy and tactics around data, you ensure that your team and operations are accountable. Providing a quantitative analysis of previous operations and their successes at the end of each month allows you to look back and think about the efficacy of your marketing campaign in reaching your goals. When planning for the future, this log of marketing data allows you to restructure campaign tactics, rethink quantitative and qualitative goals and objectives and predict the outcomes of future operations. Also, if you’re able to track marketing’s impact on company revenue, it’s a useful tool in proving the effect of your marketing campaigns on the company’s bottom line.
Let us know: how do you use data to plan for the future?
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The new marketing value chain relies on rigorous data analysis and the strategic application of insights. Social media, email marketing and content creation are three areas in which marketers can succeed with new value chain tactics, which can in turn lead to widespread growth.
Take a look at the value of these three digital tools in reaching and engaging an audience, and understand how data can be used to better implement each to achieve your marketing goals.
Social Media
Social media is integral to digital marketing. Communities including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have the power to connect brands with the public like never before. For both B2B and B2C companies, social outreach can build brand loyalty and encourage customers to spread the word about brands they like. Marketers across industries are turning traditional strategies upside down to take advantage of the new opportunities supplied by social media. For example, The Wall Street Journal recently covered designer Rebecca Taylor’s choice to give up on runway shows in favor of an intensified social campaign in order to cut costs and reach a larger audience.
Data drives social strategy. Social networks make it easy for your business to track followers and their engagement. Facebook and Twitter both offer thorough analytics about your followers, including demographic information, details such as when they are on the site each day, and a record of how many of your followers saw and engaged with each post. Use these insights to refine your social outreach, and follow the results to see what’s working.
Email Marketing
Email marketing gives brands the chance to reach their customers with more targeted, slightly longer content than social media. Even many people who are not yet on social sites have email and are willing to sign up to receive deals or information.
Most email marketing tools track data on open rates and click-through rates, so your organization can tailor its approach based on past successes. While the flood of email can sour people on branded content in their inbox, email marketing is also a chance to create something that will cut through the clutter and excite your readers.
Content Creation
Eye-catching, enjoyable content is key to achieving brand reach with social media, email marketing and around the web. Today’s marketers must invest in quality content, ranging from blog posts to graphic design to videos and podcasts. Given the rapid pace of the digital world, brands that don’t keep creating top content will fall out of view behind the ones that do.
Track your own successes and learn from other brands’ experiences when possible. Experiment with different types of content to see what’s working. Data can show you who interacts with your content and whether they share it. Then, adjust your approach accordingly.
The new marketing value chain reminds us that marketing is no longer a game of “rules and tools.” In the digital economy, the rules of the game are always changing. By using data to analyze your brand’s performance, you can stay one step ahead, strategically learning the new rules and adapting your approach.
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As we’ve discussed, data and analytics are key to proving your marketing ROI to the rest of your business. In order to demonstrate your contributions to your company as a whole, it’s necessary to connect your efforts to the growth of the company’s bottom line.
However, data and analytics are useful for many other things as well. Keeping them at the center of your marketing operations allows your department to stay accountable to its overall goals—as well as the goals of the company—that extend far beyond revenue. Today, we’ll discuss four ways marketers can use data and analytics to keep their operations accountable.
Manage Performance
Data benchmarks are key to keeping your team moving at a steady pace towards your goals. Developing quantitative benchmarks that everyone has to meet allows you to measure and track your performance to ensure that all operations are moving forward at a good speed. This information also helps you prioritize your operations and identify where things are getting held up, giving you the opportunity to revamp your activity in order to maximize productivity.
Keep Yourself on Track
While data and analytics ensure that your team is on track, they also help managers make sure they’re managing so that all marketing operations are aligning toward department and overall company goals. Aligning your operations around data is the easiest way to ensure your efforts are on target—and will help you prove your ROI.
Identify New Opportunities
Not only do data and analytics help to demonstrate the successes of your day-to-day operations, but they help to uncover new ideas to further improve your ROI. By pinpointing a business objective that’s been labeled a priority by the C-Suite, you can use customer data and analytics to identify related opportunities that can be acted on to achieve that target.
Determine Cross-Channel, Cross-Campaign Impact.
Customers don’t dwell in a single channel: they interact with your marketing across the web, social, mobile, email and more. Data and analytics keep your marketing accountable not just on each channel, but across every platform. By identifying KPIs related to cross-channel impact like cost per acquisition, conversion and customer value, you can better understand your marketing and gain a multidimensional view of how your marketing aligns with company and department goals.
Let us know: how do you use data and analytics to keep your marketing accountable to the rest of the company?
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