Measuring Success in Marketing

Many people believe that marketing analytics only involves measuring  the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign.  However, the practice actually also applies to most other inbound marketing strategies. These include blogging, lead generation, social media, lead nurturing, and landing pages, which means there is great potential for marketing analytics. Many people also believe that marketers should always be testing their marketing strategies, but the first step in the testing process is actually figuring out which marketing variables can be tested.

Layout

One of the variables that marketers can measure to test  a campaign’s success is the campaign’s  layout. That includes the layout of individual items in a business website, landing page, blog, and even emails. All of the elements inside a piece of content or a website can be moved around to test their performance against other layouts.

Colors

Companies can test the overall color scheme of a business website or its blog, or the individual elements of a website. Certain audiences have better responses to specific colors compared to others, and there’s been plenty of research on how color can be used effectively. In fact, even the simplest change in design, such as changing the “Add to Cart” button from a red to a green color, can increase a company’s conversions, perhaps because audiences find green to be a preferable color.

Calls to Action (CTAs)

There are a few different options available for testing calls to action, such as testing the performance of individual CTAs based on their placement. These placements can be  within a piece of content such as a blog post or Ebook, or even take place at a certain time, such as during a webinar. To narrow down precisely what the audience responds to the most, companies can change the color, size, text, and even the message of their CTA in order to achieve better performance. Certain offers that are centered around a specific topic, or a specific format, might resonate better with target audiences.  Figuring this out can help companies create content that consumers truly care about.

Headlines

For email marketing campaigns, the subject line of emails can be tested by creating different versions of the same line to determine which ones will generate the best open rates . For example, certain consumers find it more sensational, while others prefer more actionable subject lines. The same thing goes for headlines. This kind of testing also helps companies identify the sequences of words that most consistently attract high numbers.

Timing

Some consumers prefer receiving brand messages at a particular time of day.  For instance, people tend to check Twitter a lot more often in the morning than in the afternoon. Meanwhile, consumers on Facebook might be more active on the platform in the afternoon or evening. Figuring out what times are best  for audience engagement helps companies distribute content that generates more engagement. This goes hand in hand with the frequency of updates consumers receive from a business. Some companies can fare much better if they send out updates to consumers a few times a week, while others have to send them a few times every day, and testing is the best way to figure out what works in this regard.