Marketing technology continues to develop in impressive ways. From AI-driven customer service chatbots to predictive analytics tools driven by complex machine learning algorithms, marketers have more ways than ever before to get in front of the people they want to attract as customers.
These advancements may be exciting, but they’ve also got lots of marketers echoing a phrase once famously shouted by a fictional sports agent:
“Show me the money!”
If all this sophisticated technology can’t get you new sales, how much does it really matter?
It’s a question marketers have faced when planning campaigns with all types of technology throughout history, from radio ads to television commercials and into our current digital era.
Luckily, there are some ways to solve the problem. While some tactics are more measurable than others, there are strategies you can use to measure the results of almost any type of digital marketing campaign.
Below are four steps to measure your marketing campaigns to determine whether or not they are successful and how they might need to be improved.
To properly define success with your marketing efforts, you must first understand what’s been done in the past. Even if this is your first time actually measuring your marketing campaigns, it’s probably not the first time you’ve done some kind of marketing to promote your HVAC company. No matter how basic or simple, take some time to evaluate that activity and assess areas where it was successful and areas where it may have left something to be desired.
If you really don’t have any past activity to measure, this step will be a lot quicker. The bad news is you probably will have a larger gap between where you are now and where your campaigns need to be to get the results you desire.
After you’ve taken some time to evaluate past performance, the next step is setting goals for present campaigns. The best way to do this is to isolate a few specific metrics from your past performance and try to grow them to a reasonable degree. For example, if you’ve done some organic Facebook posts in the past, you might use views, likes, and page follows as initial metrics for an upcoming campaign.
Entire books have been written about goal setting for different kinds of marketing campaigns. Broadly speaking, the key to success here is aligning your goals to the bottom line as closely as possible. It’s fine to keep track of “vanity” metrics like the Facebook examples listed above, but you also want your metrics connected with revenue creation. Examples of these types of goals include appointments scheduled or content assets downloaded.
There’s a second part of goal setting that’s just as important as identifying goals: measuring progress toward them. Checking in on marketing campaign goals should be an ongoing process. Whether it’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly, you need a way to know how well your current campaigns are doing based on the goals you set previously.
In the plumbing, HVAC, and home services industries, a one-time purchase isn’t always a sign that you’ve created a raving fanatic of a customer who can’t wait to spread the good word about your business. Maybe a pipe exploded, and they had an urgent need to bring someone in, or perhaps they were recommended to your company by a friend or family member.
The true sign that you’ve created a loyal customer is when they do business with you more than once. It’s important to not only be tracking this metric, but ensure you have a way to correlate it with your marketing campaigns. If a campaign is creating lots of one-and-done buyers, you might need to reconsider your audience targeting or adjust the way you follow up.
Up to this point, we’ve listed several quantifiable ways to track the success of your campaigns. Now we’re telling you to ignore them. No, not completely – the strategies discussed in this article to get concrete measurements on your marketing campaigns should be the biggest factors in strategic decision-making.
But it’s important that they aren’t the only factors. You still need to look at things like social sentiment, individual interactions with customers, and the alignment of your campaigns with your company’s mission and values. These items are all relatively tough to quantify – you have to immerse yourself in the customer community and go beyond data to understand what people really think about your company. This may require a more personal touch that sees you talking directly to members of your audience to get their opinions.
Marketers have been struggling to quantify the success of their campaigns for centuries. Retail entrepreneur John Wanamaker – who opened his namesake department store in 1876 – famously proclaimed, “Half my advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
We can’t promise to remove every last bit of complexity and waste from your digital marketing campaigns, but we can help you understand how to get there. Our team has years of combined experience working with plumbers, HVAC companies, and other types of service businesses looking to get a better grasp on their marketing to eliminate waste and boost ROI.
Ryan Redding