In the early 20th century, advertising giant John Wanamaker coined the phrase “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half”. A century later, marketers still struggle to pinpoint the success of their campaigns and validate their efforts.

While the glass half full folks might say “at least your campaign is half successful”, they’re only half right. Unvalidated efforts and data-poor strategies just aren’t good enough. Understanding which content, techniques and platforms were most effective will help you to maintain results and achieve greater success in the future. It’ll also keep your boss happy, so that’s a plus!

This process of gathering and analysing data is crucial for your business.

1. Evaluate your content strategy

Whoever crowned content as king chose a worthy ambassador. Though “content is king” is one of the most used and abused phrases of the marketing world, it’s got a lot of truth to it. Demand metric’s content marketing infographic is a thorough reminder of the power of content, for building relationships and delivering results.

A standard ROI content marketing calculator will help you determine the success of your content strategy. However, this simple figure doesn’t tell the whole story. Ask yourself, which content:

1. Delivered the highest visitor to lead conversion rate
2. Drove the most revenue
3. Had the lowest bounce rate

For marketers, there are a number of “vanity” metrics to treat with caution. Some numbers, such as number of monthly website visitors, may give a false sense of improvement. If your traffic has doubled since last month, then it’s easy to attribute this to any number of factors. It feels like a victory. However, if this spike in traffic is coupled with a high bounce rate, then you haven’t really captured more potential customers.

Therefore, when it comes to data, less isn’t necessarily more. More data simply creates a clearer picture.

The visitor to lead conversion rate is a good indicator of your content strategy’s success. Improvements in this figure indicate that:

1. Your site is receiving more qualified visitors
2. Your content is better answering the questions and concerns of your ideal customer

Small spikes in this figure can lead to considerable results at the end of the funnel. 

Tracking improvements in your site’s bounce rate, average visitor time and percentage of return visitors is useful for figuring out long term trends. Google analytics is the favoured tool for many marketers for finding these figures.

2. Examine your social media presence

Social media is both a powerful tool and a death trap for the vain. Unfortunately evaluating a business’ social presence often begins and ends with the number of followers at the end of each month.

Likes + followers don’t = revenue.

Unless those social media efforts are driving conversions, your strategy needs to change. Without the data to prove the lack of conversions through social media, your business is missing out on valuable opportunities and confused as to why. Discover which platforms deliver the highest conversion rate, and how your ideal customers interact online. These two things are closely intertwined.

The greater you understand your ideal customers, the better you’ll be able to interact with them online. The more tailored your methods of interaction online, the more likely you’ll convert strangers to visitors to leads. This includes choosing the right platforms to leverage, as well the suitable time of day, tone of messages and frequency of updates.

At the end of every campaign or month, evaluate which platforms delivered the most traffic and the highest conversion rate. Furthermore, examine what times your followers engage the most and click more. This often depends on your industry. For example, millennial-dominant social channel Snapchat favours B2C industries. In comparison, architects working in a largely B2B environment favour visual platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest, as well as “professional” platforms like Linkedin.

While conversion rates are the primary piece of information to gather, it’s still beneficial to consider:

• Number of followers and page likes
• Engagement rate
• Click through rate
• Organic reach

These stats are the micro-conversions which push potential customers further down the funnel. They’re meaningless when used alone, yet crucial in your overall data-driven strategy.

3. Investigate your email marketing metrics

If marketing was like a party, then email would be the social butterfly who got along with everyone. He’s the one who’s known everyone the longest and has fond memories of life when things were a lot simpler.

As a medium people are accustomed to using in a personal way, email is useful for nurturing leads and delighting customers. Validating your email marketing efforts often involves measuring:

• Average unique open rate
• Average unique click rate
• Average unique soft bounce rate

Email lists decay at a rate of 22.5% every year, so soft and hard bounces are an inevitability. However simple steps can help you to avoid the pesky spam filter.

Once you’ve gathered your average open, click and soft bounce rates for each campaign, compare these stats to industry benchmarks. For example, there’s a large difference in industry benchmarks for the construction industry compared to the ecommerce industry.

Unrealistic goals cause unnecessary disappointment At the other end, low goals leave your business at a disadvantage to the competition.

4. Streamline your marketing automation workflow

Validating your marketing efforts is important, both for demonstrating your hard work to your boss and developing future campaigns built on data-driven strategy. The sheer volume of facts and figures to find can be overwhelming. Setting up and streamlining the right marketing automation will make life a whole lot easier.

Using a simple tool like Zapier you could automate a large portion of the data gathering process. For example, you could save certain tweets in a Google Sheet with a single “zap”. For the most streamlined approach, you could try an all-in-one marketing and CRM software like Hubspot.

Conclusion

While validating your marketing efforts won’t be easy-peasy to start with, it can become a more streamlined process. Likes, clicks and follows are all great, but conversions are key. With your eye on the most valuable metrics and a methodical approach to data gathering, then your campaigns are set for success.