30th July 2015 0

Matt

Back in 2013, we wrote a series of articles for The Lincolnite looking at measuring marketing activity and return on investment. We also had a look at evaluating digital campaigns. How have things changed?


After recently writing a post about PR evaluation and the death of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), it got me thinking about measuring success for wider marketing campaigns.

In such a creative industry, planning and measurement is often pushed to the bottom of the pile, while actually doing is seen as a much more attractive role.

I like to think that planning and measurement are part of a journey. If you don’t know where you are, how do you know where you’re going? If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you get there?

It sounds simple, but without planning campaigns and evaluating their outcomes, it’s virtually impossible to measure if your work was successful or not.

Most people think of planning and analysis as a boring, costly and long-winded, often giving the task to juniors or outsourcing it to specialists. However, measurement doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. In fact, there are a wide range of cheap or free methods that can be easily implemented and used in campaign measurement.

I’ve put together the following five ways to evaluate your marketing campaigns, to help make sure that you meet your objectives and exceed expectations.

Tracking your digital campaigns
With over 80% of the population connected to the internet, no marketing campaign can be complete without the use of social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and blogging. Tools like Google Analytics let you measure sales and conversions, giving you insights into how visitors use your site, where they enter and where they leave. The tool is completely free, easy to use and allows you to track the success of your online activity.

Tracking your advertising campaigns
Although adverts reach a large audience and therefore can often be difficult to measure, by planning it is possible to evaluate their success.

Why not add a unique URL, unique reference number or QR code to your advert. This way, you can directly track responses and customer feedback.

Tracking your public relations campaigns
Most people still use advertising value equivalent (AVE) to measure the success of PR campaigns, but thinking outside the box can help to provide more accurate feedback.

Look at the reach and circulation of your key messages, as well as the positivity of reporting. This can highlight how many people received your message and simple sales analysis can highlight how many acted upon it.

Measuring the success of your events
Although measuring footfall is the standard evaluation technique used in events management, it doesn’t highlight if your event was successful or not.

Try introducing a questionnaire and asking attendees to fill it out. By doing this, you can collect genuine feedback and gather other useful market research information.

Tracking your sales promotion campaigns
Sales promotion is a great way of increasing sales. Why not add a unique code or voucher system to your promotion? This way, you can track exactly how many customers purchased from you as a result of the promotion, helping you to plan future campaigns.

By taking time to measure the effects of your marketing, you can easily test the effectiveness of your work. It can also help inform your next move and future campaigns.


23rd July 2015 0

Matt

This post was originally written for The Lincolnite news website in 2013 but it’s still all relevant to today.


Despite sustained economic growth during the first and second quarters of 2013, businesses nationwide are still faced with challenging market conditions.

In fact, with few companies reporting notable share price rises, minimal consumer spending figures and high lending charges across the UK, it seems that we have significant distance to go before reaching dry ground.

With this in mind, more and more businesses are looking towards marketing initiatives to maintain income and stay afloat. In particular, focus is being driven towards a customer-relations approach.

Although a simple principle, keeping your customers front of mind is essential to long-term business success. Long gone are the days of asymmetric communication, identifying quick leads and hard selling. Instead, focus must shift towards listening to your customers, reacting to their changing requirements, building trust and developing relationships.

Listening, however, is something often overshadowed by sales targets, promotional strategies and finance plans. But with daily reports of business bankruptcy, liquidation and administration, can you really afford not to?

Retaining Customers
There is no straightforward equation to ensure a high customer retention rate. This said, we do know that trust, confidence and self-association are all key to building emotional bonds.

Although this sounds complex, building and retaining trust is relatively simple. In fact, it should come naturally from good business practice.

Monitoring market trends and requirements, creating new and improved products and rectifying poor customer experiences is key, and, what’s more, there are a number of marketing tools that allow you to do this easily.

Here’s some of the most popular examples to get you started:

Social Media
From Facebook and Twitter to YouTube, Pinterest and blogging, social media gives a direct communications channel to engage with stakeholders, interact directly, respond to queries and monitor feedback.

Free to set up, simple to run and easy to manage, social media is one of the most effective relationship management tools.

Digital Marketing
With over 85% of the population online, 74% using email and nearly 35% owning a tablet device*, digital marketing techniques, such as infographics and e-newsletters, can provide a great way to stay in contact and build relationships.

Personalised, targeted and cost-effective, e-newsletters are a great way to keep front of mind, tell customers about the latest news and views, as well as ask for feedback. Cloud-based software, such as Mailchimp and Bronto, can distribute information free of charge, as well as provide open and click-through reports – giving useful data capture information.

Direct Mail
Developing relationships, building confidence and engaging customers relies on consistent impact and repetition.

Although historically used to advertise, direct mail is a great engagement tool. You can let customers know about the latest products, provide discount offers, give them something for nothing and easily keep front of mind.

Low cost and powerful, direct mail is still the most widely used marketing tool and a great tactic to build relationships.

Rewards
Something as simple as saying thank you can help to retain custom. From loyalty cards and vouchers to repeat purchase rewards, events and priority services, delivering a personal approach and ensuring each customer is considered a valued individual can develop strong bonds.

This can even be integrated with social media, digital marketing, direct mail and other marketing tools to ensure increase influence and ensure communications efficiency.

Although just a few ideas of customer relations tactics, the tactics above give insight into the importance of listening, rewarding, responding and actioning.


8th November 2013 0

Ed

After recently writing a post about PR evaluation and the death of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), it got me thinking about measuring success for wider marketing campaigns.

In such a creative industry, planning and measurement is often pushed to the bottom of the pile, while actually doing is seen as a much more attractive role.

I like to think that planning and measurement are part of a journey. If you don’t know where you are, how do you know where you’re going? If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you get there?

Twitter_Xfactor.png

4th September 2013 0

Sammy

The X Factor is back for its tenth year anniversary, and to create added build up and anticipation for the launch, a tweet announced a fifth judge for the series.

The cryptic tweet “Fifth Judge? #fifthjudge” sent the public and media into overdrive following the already huge announcement of Sharon Osbourne’s return.


14th August 2013 0

Annie

Marmite’s latest TV advert in which a spoof rescue team saves ‘stricken’ jars of the yeast extract from Britain’s homes has caused a serious stir.

Within the first 24 hours of its release last Monday, the ad attracted 250 complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency and was dubbed as ‘offensive’ and ‘tasteless’.