Start with Marketing Goals
We work with over a hundred clients and talk with hundreds of prospects each year. The first item of discussion in any of those conversations should be focused around the goal, or goals, of the marketing for the company. The only way to have success is to know success. We have to know what success looks like and then we can customize the marketing efforts to achieve that success. Success can look very different from one company to the next or even one campaign to the next. What is the goal of the marketing efforts?
In order to get an understanding of the goal, the conversation should be centered around some questions like the following.
Questions to Help Understand Marketing Goals
- What are you trying to accomplish?
- What does success look like to you?
- How do you measure your efforts so you can recognize success?
These questions get the conversation started. It is the job of the person handling the conversation to dive deeper. We use questions like those above as a jumping off point, but hope to land in a specific place upon further discussion.
Potential Marketing Goals
- Awareness
- Branding
- Leads
- Sales
- Visits
- Follows
- Likes
- Shares
These are typical marketing goals and this is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea of some of the different directions a marketing campaign can go. Which one is right for your campaign?
Develop the How from the Why
Once we have the answer to why we are marketing, then we can start work on the rest of the questions. How are we marketing? Where are we marketing? When should we market? Who should we market to? What is it that we are marketing? These are essential questions to answer and most people will agree with this. The problem is they tend to get answered out of order. We have to know why we are marketing and what success looks like, then we can go into who, what, when, where, and how. It all starts to come together thanks to the why.
Measuring Marketing Success
If we know what success looks like, because we have a good understanding of our marketing goals, then it is important to know how we will measure our performance while working on those goals. Most forms of advertising have some sort of metrics associated with them.
Let’s look at the example of an ad placement on Google. Ads on Google run through AdWords. The people running the campaigns will be monitoring items such as impressions, CTR (click through rate), and CPC (cost per click). While those items are important to monitor, they are only part of the puzzle. The real number to monitor is the goal. Like we mentioned in the list of goals above, the ultimate goal could be leads. Our impressions, CTR, and CPC only tell us how we are doing in AdWords, but if leads are the ultimate goal, then we should be measuring how our lead volume is specifically affected by our AdWords campaign.
Using a Real Example: In This Case Self-Storage
What are the key metrics for storage?
- Cost per lead – Notice the addition of “cost” to the metric.
- Cost per rental
- Lease-up time
- Occupancy rate
How do we get to the metrics above?
- Track phone calls
- Monitor online leads
- Track rentals
- Monitor occupancy by location
- Work diligently on attribution
How do I get to a cost per rental?
- Phone tracking lines
- Traffic attribution
- Parameterized URLs
- Cookies
- Tracking tags
- Analytics tracking
So you can see, the specificity of the goal is what makes the example above a good one. We are looking specifically at cost per lead, or cost per rental. If we know the cost goals, then we will know if our marketing efforts are a success when measured against those specific marketing goals.
This is where we can leave the self-storage example and move on down the marketing funnel to analyze and monitor specific tactics. In this case, we will look at online marketing tactics, since those are the channels I know the best. So like I said, once we have our business metrics in place and we are measuring those items, then we can focus on individual marketing tactics and their corresponding metrics.
What are the typical online marketing tactics?
- SEO
- PPC
- Social media (ex. Influencer marketing)
- Local listings
- IYPs
- Mobile
What metrics matter the most? What should I track?
SEO
- Rankings for appropriate keywords
- Looking for keywords with volume that are relevant. Focus should not be on vanity.
- Organic visits
- Organic leads
- This is not something that most agencies track. You want to work hard to refine the conversion funnel to get the most out of your inbound traffic.
- Users
- Sessions
- Bounce rate
- Session duration
PPC
- Competitive metrics
- Impressions
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
- Click-thru-rate (CTR)
- Impression share lost to budget
- Impression share lost to rank
- Results-based metrics
- Cost per inquiry
- Cost per rental
- Inquiry to rental percentage
Local Listings
- Inclusion
- Saturation
- Duplication
- Accuracy
- Enhancement
Social – This will depend on the social property, but this is a start.
- Facebook
- Likes
- Views
- Reach
- Shares
- Twitter
- Followers
- Following
- Tweets
- Click through count on links shared
- Impressions
- YouTube
- Views
- Subscribers
- Comment count
- Pinterest
- Pins
- Followers
- Repins
- Google+
- Followers
- People in circles
- List count
- Email count
- Open rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Click thru rate
- Conversion rate
Mobile
- Depends on the platform
- % of mobile traffic to website
- App downloads
- Mobile conversion rate
- Page load time
Wrap it up already!
Hopefully this gives you a start when it comes to marketing goals and the focus on why. Why are we marketing? What does success look like with respect to our marketing efforts? Once we have answers to those questions, then we can jump off into so many different directions. Without those answers, we will never know if we have arrived at where we were going.
