Marketing has evolved from somewhat of an art into a very precise and quantifiable science. No marketing campaign should ever be rolled out without a robust understanding of how to measure whether your campaign was a resounding success or, contrarily, a bit of a let-down.
Your marketing efforts should not only be measurable, but consistently analysed, tweaked and re-worked to fit an evolving landscape and a sometimes changing consumer demographic.
Here are four crucial metrics you need to be measuring to get your B2C marketing campaigns just right:
1. Social Engagement
Marketing has radically changed in the past decade or so and many classical approaches are no longer as effective as they once were. 92% of consumers now turn to people they know for referrals above any other source and influencer marketing is the fastest growing channel for customer acquisition. This means recommendations and experiences of friends, families or peers are of utmost importance and therefore, social engagement indicators are one of the most valuable B2C metrics to measure. It’s not just a superficial popularity contest – social engagement truly does translate into conversion and loyalty, and will help you build a strong B2C lead generation strategy.
Tracking, responding to, and optimizing for social engagement should be a key component of your marketing strategy. Each social media channel will require different approaches to tracking. Likes, engagement, and follows are obvious indicators, but these do not suffice and are not necessarily indicative of successful marketing because:
- Nearly 48 million accounts are thought to be bots on Twitter alone, and a big chunk of your social shares could be coming from these accounts and not your target customers.
- Social shares may steam from customers speaking negatively about their experience with your company.
Clearly, shares and likes alone don’t give an accurate picture. Focus on lead growth and use an attribution program to measure how many touch points such as social interactions, site visits or emails to convert a prospective customer and evaluate whether your social media campaigns are producing relevant leads.
You can also use programs such as Google Insights and Google Trends to dig into how search volume for your company stacks up against that of your competitors. Understanding your positioning here will help you understand the effectiveness of your social media efforts.
2. Flawless Customer Experience
When it comes to measuring campaigns, ROI is often seen as one of the most important, albeit complex, metrics. After all, no ROI = no budget. You can measure social media, readership and viewership figures until you’re blue in the face, but for the higher-ups in your company this may mean little if you can’t show a direct correlation to profit.
However, tracking ROI should not mean you overlook the most critical factor: a positive customer experience. Any good marketer should always have the customer’s satisfaction at the very forefront of their measuring. Sure, a customer may have purchased from you. But do they trust your brand? Did you make them feel valued? Do they truly understand the product? These critical factors are often overlooked in favour of more direct financial gains. Positive customer experience comprises everything from walking new customers through your product, handling issues effectively, and designing marketing that makes customers feel like human beings instead of a number. It is hands down the most effective element in making a brand successful. Keeping this at the forefront of your measurements is key to pivoting your company’s mindset towards the happiness of your customers.
When designing your marketing strategy, focus on implementing campaigns that deepen an emotional connection with customers which providing valuable content, all while being highly measurable. For example, brands like Cadbury, Deutsche Telekom and Zurich use Personalized Videos for highly effective onboarding, product launches, and promotions and were able to measure their efforts through video completion rates and customer satisfaction surveys.
3. Traffic Conversions
Your website will be the first port of call for a sizeable chunk of your potential customers, so continuously examining key B2C metrics behind its performance is a must. The most important metric, perhaps, is how many of your website visitors actually convert and become leads. Heavy traffic doesn’t mean much if your conversion rates are flailing. Tracking this metric is going to give you some super valuable insights into the quality of your website’s traffic and its conversion rate. Landing pages should be a core piece of this. Take a look at the number of people who visit your landing pages and evaluate whether your calls to action are indeed converting them. If your numbers are looking weak, consider streamlining the design, reexamine your SEO efforts, or include video on the landing page for way better conversion rates.
4. Email Marketing Performance
Even as technology rapidly redefines communication, the humble e-mail remains one of the most effective and critical channels to touch your customers. E-mail marketing is a substantial feature of marketing plans for most brands, meaning every email campaign should also be scrutinized and evaluated over and over again. There’s a range of factors here that you can delve into and compartmentalize to understand what’s working:
- Open Rate: You have a large contact base, but how many are actually opening them? Tweaks to your scheduling, subject lines and the implementation of your drip campaigns can help improve your success here.
- Click Through Rate: Out of those who opened their e-mails, how many clicked on your calls to action? Your CTR rate be improved through a focus on dynamic content, including copy, images and videos that are hyper-personalized to each user
- Conversion Rate: How many touches does it take to convert a recipient of your campaigns? Are you doing enough to impress your leads when they are still warm?
- Unsubscribe Rate: A tendency can be to throw out content and hope something sticks. Your unsubscribe rate will soon tell you if you are not doing enough to speak to your customers as individuals.
There is no excuse in this day and age for not having a deep and data-driven understanding of whether your marketing campaigns are working. There are myriad metrics you can measure to gain insights into the effectiveness of your B2C marketing campaigns and adjust accordingly for the future, but there are a few that can truly set your measuring apart. Continuously evaluating and adjusting your content on landing pages and e-mails is crucial to ensuring successful conversion. Calculating ROI is an obvious and important metric you need to establish your effectiveness and of course to securing and justifying budgets. However, this should not overshadow that the crucial element of measuring a fantastic customer experience, which will pay far more dividends to your brand’s long-term success.
If you found this useful and you’d like to learn how to take advantage of the latest trends in a fast-paced and ever-evolving marketing landscape, we invite you to download a copy of our “How to stay ahead of the game in the marketing industry” guide for CMOs.
