So you’ve decided to launch a marketing campaign, eh? You’ve developed a strategy, and have created plenty of content for your website and social media channels. If you’re anything like our clients, you are already thinking about how you will measure the performance of this campaign. If you’re struggling on which metrics to monitor or how many clicks or conversions to expect, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Do you find yourself asking your PR or lead generation agency, “If I produce a data report, how many downloads can I expect?” or “How many views will I get on my video?” The short answer is, it depends. When planning and executing any social or digital marketing campaign, the number of clicks or conversions should be directly measured against your campaign goals and broader business objectives.
For example, if your goal is to raise awareness, earning a high number of impressions will be important in KPI tracking. Alternatively, if you are running an account-based marketing (ABM) campaign, your clicks may be low but if they are coming from your target prospects then they’re highly valuable. Having this context when considering clicks and conversions will help you spend marketing dollars wisely and target the right audiences.
Due to the customizable nature of PPC, email and other marketing campaigns, finding accurate comparisons for your campaign can be challenging. For example, the average PPC click-through rate is between 2-5% with top performers seeing rates of 10% and above. As for landing pages, our clients see conversion rates of 20%+. When setting goals and forming expectations with your demand generation firm, you should view your campaign through two lenses - one focused on the audience and the other focusing on your promotion tactics.
Audience
First and foremost, audience targeting will have the biggest impact on campaign success, but can also be the most challenging. In fact, a whopping 62% of Facebook advertisers often miss their audiences.
Imagine looking for information on how to find cheap flights and being flooded with information on applying for travel rewards credit cards. Start by drilling down on audience targeting to limit your reach to prospects who are most likely to take the desired action, like giving you their email address to download an eBook or watching your branded video.
Next, consider what stage of the marketing funnel your audience is in. Are they a cold audience that has never engaged with your brand before? Or are you using a remarketing list of a more brand-aware audience? Obviously, it will take more work to see results from a cold audience versus people who are already aware of your company.
The key to remember throughout this process is that everything is relative and that drastic results will take time. Instead, look for smaller data trends that point to audience behavior and how they interact with your PPC ads, landing page, email newsletter, etc.
Promotion
All channels are not created equal. Just as click and conversion rates vary by industry, they also vary by channels of promotion. For example, it’s entirely possible that your PPC ads drive the most visitors to a landing page, but social media activity ends up driving more clicks and a piece of earned media coverage ends up referring the most visitors that convert. This even varies between platforms as CTRs on Facebook average 0.9% versus Twitter’s 1.51%. Looking at the bigger picture and the end goal will help you determine the best approach for each promotional channel.
This includes taking a data-driven and SEO-centric approach to the media relations component of your promotion strategy. Although it takes time, your PR agency should analyze which of your target keywords and phrases have high search rankings and incorporate them throughout your media content to ultimately complement the goals of your specific campaign. Over time, your articles, press-releases, interviews, bylines, etc. will appear higher in Google searches if drafted correctly.
Need some inspiration? Look at your previous content. If conversion rates were particularly high for certain pieces of content, it would make sense to repurpose these pieces to fit your desired promotional channels and continue future campaigns that align with this past success.
Bottom line, finding comparable third-party data to measure your campaign performance against is going to be difficult. Let’s face it, your competitors aren’t going to be chomping at the bit to share data on their marketing performance. Instead go with historical data for similar projects over your gut instinct when looking to set expectations and benchmarks for your next campaign.
Need help incorporating one of the phases of our Alloy Methodology in your next marketing campaign? See how we helped a cybersecurity client land 115 media placements, while also increasing web traffic over 300% and learn how we can do the same for you.