As we approach the end of the year, it’s a popular time for businesses to review what’s happened over the last 12 months to work out what’s worked and perhaps identify what hasn’t.
Most businesses will often look at this from a financial perspective, looking at what has been spent over the last year but not having a clear understanding of what this resulted in. At Carrick Creative we always advise carrying out a detailed review on not just your financial activity but also breaking this down within your marketing activity on a granular level. This will allow you to get some great insight into what activities have resulted in the best return on investment.
Tracking your marketing activity has become quite sophisticated, when you have the right things in place, you can see for example which social media posts have resulted in clicks to a specific page on your website, how many website contact forms have been filled out because of a social media ad campaign, or maybe even which email campaign resulted in the most sales.Without detailed tracking and monitoring of these marketing metrics, you’re not going to have a clear overview of where your money is best spent, so this is a useful exercise to carry out. Knowing which marketing activities are resulting in the best return can help you inform your marketing strategy for the year, quarter, or month ahead.
Key Metrics To Look Out For
When it comes to monitoring your marketing metrics, it’s important to work out which metrics are important for your business and your business objectives.
Here are a couple of examples of what we mean by this:
If your business objective is to build an engaged community on a social media channel, for example, Instagram. You might want to focus on the metrics like Post Saves and Comments. These metrics indicate that people are taking action and engaging with your account. Whereas the metric that focuses on post reach (how many people saw your content) might not be as important for you.
If your objective is to drive traffic to your website and get your visitors to take a specific action, for example, make a purchase or complete a contact form, you might want to identify which source of traffic is attaining the best results in this. Is it your social media activity? Or maybe it’s your organic search results? Perhaps, even your email marketing campaigns? Google analytics provides a great insight to this.
If your objective is to increase ecommerce sales with a low cost per conversion, you might want to carry out a detailed analysis on your Facebook Ad Campaigns to work out which campaign, Ad Set, and Ads are resulting in the lowest costs.
When you know what objective you want to achieve, it helps you create a clear strategy to help you attain this, and helps you identify what exactly you need to be monitoring to see if your activity is proving successful.
Monitoring Your Metrics And Creating Reports
Although you might enter 2023 with the best intentions to monitor your marketing metrics, we know that it is a task that often gets put to the bottom of the pile. We recommend setting up a monthly reminder so that this important task is completed each month, you don’t want to have a big surprise when the year ends.
There are some great tools available that will create reports for you, however, if you work with a digital marketing/creative agency like Carrick, we will always provide a bespoke custom report to our clients. This breaks down the data and highlights key take aways ensuring you have a clear understanding.
If you’d like to start 2023 on the right track, get in touch with our experienced marketing team at Carrick Creative who are on hand to help you get the most of your marketing activity and help you attain the best return on your investment.