5 Steps to Building your Marketing Measurement Plan
In my last blog post, I discussed why it’s so important to create a Marketing Measurement Plan, you can read about that here. In this post, I want to walk you through the 5 steps to go about doing this.
As I mentioned in my last post, a Marketing Measurement Plan is your roadmap for how you will measure the performance of your various marketing initiatives.
You use it to understand if you’re on track with your goals or if you need to make adjustments to ensure you meet them.
When it comes to creating your Marketing Measurement Plan, there are 5 key things you should work through to ensure you have a complete and effective plan.
They are:
Identify Objectives
Establish your goals
Determine your Key Performing Indicators (KPIs)
Set targets for your KPIs
Identify the segments you want to analyze
Let’s begin!
1. Identify Objectives
What do I mean by objectives, well, I want you to think about this is as in what do you want the marketing tactic to accomplish for your business.
It’s important that you take each of your tactics (i.e. Facebook ads, Facebook organic, Instagram organic, Paid Search, Twitter…) and determine what you would want it to do for your business.
For example, let’s say you have a Yoga Studio and one of the marketing tactics that you have for your business is an Instagram business account. You have determined that you’re going to use this tactic to build a community, get new clients, and promote classes and upcoming events at the studio.
Do you need a different objective for each marketing tactic?
Well, this depends on how you’re using that tactic to accomplish for your business objectives.
Perhaps your Facebook campaign is quite different from your Instagram as you have found that you have a different audience on each. This means that you will need to identify an objective for each tactic and perhaps even each campaign you’re running in each tactic.
You always need to come back to the following question.
‘What do I want this tactic to accomplish for the business?’
Once you have your objective defined, it’s on to step 2.
2. Establish Your Goals
Ok, so let’s talk about goals. You need to understand what you want people to do when they view and interact with your tactic/content.
What are the actions that you want people to take?
Understanding what the goals are, will ensure that your message is clear and that there’s a clear action that you want those who see your content to take.
Let’s take our example of the Yoga Studio. We know that one of their objectives is to build a community.
The next question then is… in what way do they want to build this community? On Instagram through more Instagram followers? On their website through more subscribers to their newsletter?
Defining exactly what the goal is, will ensure that everything that comes next is defined and set up correctly.
Once you have the goals established for the objective of the tactic(s), then it’s time to start thinking about what metrics you’ll be tracking to evaluate performance, which brings us to step 3.
3. Determine Your KPIs
Your Key Performing Indicators (KPIs) should be actions that users take when interacting with your tactic/campaign that give you a clear indication of how it’s performing.
KPIs are the metrics you will use to make decisions on whether or not you need to keep going or make changes on what you’re doing.
Let’s take the Yoga Studio example to understand the KPIs for their Instagram tactic.
One of their objectives was to get new clients, this means that the KPI for this objective will be the % of clients that they obtain from Instagram.
Some examples of KPIs are:
Conversion rate - This could be looking at the percentage of users who do the important actions on your site, things like: register to the newsletter, make a purchase, download a document, etc.
Non bounced visits - what is the percentage of your visitors from these tactics that don’t just come to the site and leave after only viewing 1 page.
Visitor loyalty - this looks at how many times visitors return to your site.
What’s important when choosing your KPIs is choosing ones that will give you the information you need to make a decision on whether what you’re doing is working or not.
Once you have identified your KPIs for each objective, the next important thing to do is determine your targets.
4. Set Targets for your KPIs
Setting targets is crucial. I understand that it may not be fun to do so and many may feel apprehension at setting a target for fear of ‘not reaching it’.
This is exactly why you need to set targets for your KPIs. Identifying how much of something you want to achieve will help you see exactly how close or far you are from doing so.
How do you determine your targets?
Well, there are a few of ways to go about it:
You can look at your historical performance and determine how much growth you want to have
You can look at industry benchmarks and start there.
If you’re working on creating a Marketing Measurement Plan for a client, ask them what their targets are for their business.
A combination of all the above.
If you’re unsure as to what your target should be, choose a number and then revise it once you have more information. The important thing is to have a target to aim for.
Now for the last thing to have in your Marketing Measurement Plan.
5. Identify the Segments to Analyze
Speaking from personal experience, it’s very easy to go down a data analysis rabbit hole when you don’t determine ahead of time who/what you’re going to look at.
What do I mean by this?
Well, perhaps you have different creatives/messaging for people who are at different stages in the customer journey. You’re going to want to understand how each segment of visitors engages with your KPIs.
At the highest level, you can analyze the performance of your KPIs by the various campaigns/messaging/creative/landing pages of the various marketing tactics.
To read more about segments, you can read the blog post I wrote here. This post focuses on segments to evaluate your entire site and not just your marketing tactics, nevertheless, I highly recommend that you take a look and think about how you can look at your business analytics through these lenses.
There you have it!
The 5 key steps you need to go through to build your Marketing Measurement Plan.
It’s important to always remember, that this is a living and evolving plan. If you make changes to your marketing initiatives (adding/removing/modifying) then you should go through each of the 5 steps and make the necessary changes/additions.
A Marketing Measurement Plan is not something that you create once and forget about it, you need to go back to it and ensure it still makes sense for the business and what you’re trying to accomplish.
Happy Measuring and Analyzing!