Ask the Experts | Measuring Marketing Campaign Success

Question: How do I know if a marketing campaign is successful?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

I think the high-level question is “How do I know my marketing dollars are working?” So, you basically have two mechanisms working at the same time in marketing. You always have brand – and brand is something we simply identify as trust, and how someone is feeling about your overall experience, and how much they trust that particular brand.

And the second issue is lead generation. We’re small business owners, we don’t have unlimited resources, so we’ve got to be focused on the idea that we’re creating a lead, we’re creating an opportunity for the company so that we can convert; conversion is just as important for a company as the lead. So we look at cost per lead, but we also look at the cost per conversion. So those are both metrics.

Typically, marketing, then you spend money, the resources that are allocated – it’s almost always best to be in balanced platform of some sort so you’re not heavy in one area or the other. Media tend to be specific to demographics, and how people actually engage or uptake media. So some people still like to read the newspaper. Some people, believe it or not, still have the Yellow Pages. And of course the world is moving digitally and so forth. So you can’t ignore any medium, you need balance.

So directly the answer of “Marketing, how do I know it works?” I think what you want is you want to be able to measure the quality of the leads that are coming in, the cost per lead tells you that but the quantity of the leads that are coming in also dictates that. And then, from my point of view, conversion is equally important. Training up the customer service reps; training about promotions; what technology you might have on the website; what are you selling; the message; the callbooking, getting to the 75-80% callbooking procedure. Those are forms of internal marketing, internal training, communications.

And then the operational marketing is really, Are the techs properly inventoried to be able to create the conversion? Do we actually sell the accessory off the promotion?, and so forth. So there’s three layers: There’s the external, the internal and there’s the operational side. So you want all three of those to be analyzed in terms of a marketing campaign.

So it’s pretty simple: We can send out a direct mail piece for precision tune-ups, and we might get 25% responses back and see that as successful based on the cost we spent. So the other part of the issue here is making sure that you do track the performance metrics, and that you have a unique promotion. There’s lots of technologies out there that we use today on the digital side, specific to media, so we can track all that.

Could go a long ways answering this question, we could spend a week on this topic, that’s kind of my once over, so Drew I’ll toss that over to you, I’m sure you’ve got some comments.

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