Companies with a compelling multi-channel marketing campaign can retain as many as 90% of customers. Customers prefer to engage with their favourite brands across more than one platform. But how do you evaluate whether your multi-channel marketing campaign is effective? This article will help analyse marketing strategy and measure which of your campaigns are most successful.
Analysing Your Marketing Strategy
The journey that customers take from product awareness through to purchase is not always a linear one. They may see a webinar that raises awareness of your product, read a blog post about your new product launch on your website, click on a social media campaign later on, and then buy your product. A non-linear sales funnel makes analysing marketing strategy complex, particularly when it is multi-channel.
Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to make your multi-channel evaluation more effective.
Establish Success Criteria For Each Channel
The success criteria of each channel will depend on the customer journey. Your webinar might increase customer awareness of your product, signpost users to a blog post to garner interest, and then link to the product on your website to make a purchase. Each channel will fulfil a different part of your overall campaign and have unique success criteria, making it impossible to have the same success and metrics for each channel.
Evaluate Your Touchpoints
Once you have established success criteria for each channel, you can evaluate the customer touchpoints along the way. A touchpoint is when the potential customer engages with a particular part of your campaign, either with your blog, webinar, or social media platform. Your customer might not convert to a purchase when they view your webinar, but you could attribute that touchpoint to their later purchase on your website.
Touchpoints are a vital part of analysing marketing strategy, as they can help you evaluate whether you are successfully guiding the customer through your campaign to a direct purchase. Creating a campaign story through touchpoints is more effective than simply promoting your product in the same way across each platform. It helps to guide the customer through each part of the sales funnel and hopefully convert them to a later purchase.
Understand The Metrics
Once you have a clear idea of where each channel should sit in the sales funnel, you can interpret the success of your metrics on each platform.
Some core metrics to track could include:
- Impressions – how many times do users see your content? Impressions count the number of views rather than the number of users.
- Reach – how many users have seen your content? Reach counts the number of users rather than the number of views.
- Engagement rate – refers to the number of times users share, like, or comment on your content.
- Click-through rate – how often users click on your content to get to your website.
- Referrals – where the user entered your site from – e.g. they clicked on a Twitter ad to get to your landing page.
Interpret The Data
Once you have a clear set of metrics for each social media channel, you can start to interpret the data and determine whether it meets the success criteria you outlined.
For example:
- High reach/ number of impressions – show that your webinar successfully raised awareness of your product or brand.
- High engagement/click-through rate – this could show that the blog post highlighting your product was successful, as many users engaged with it and later clicked through to your product.
- Referrals – could help determine which social media platforms play a pivotal role in converting to final sales.
When analysing your marketing strategy, you may also find that some channels are not performing as you intended. Your webinar might have high engagement but a low number of impressions, which might make it unsuitable for the top of the sales funnel where you are trying to bring customers in. Your blog post might have a higher number of impressions, but a low click-through rate, meaning it’s not fulfilling its role at the end of the sales funnel where you need a customer to make a purchase.
How To Optimise Your Multi-channel Marketing Strategy
Analysing marketing strategy allows you to identify and implement measures to make your multi-channel marketing more successful.
Improve Your Responses
Statistics show that over 80% of customers expect a response to an inquiry within 10 minutes. Improving your response times can have a significant impact on the overall success of your campaign.
Two improvement statistics you can use to reflect on your responsiveness include:
- Response rate – how often do you respond to your customers? If you had 50 messages and responded to 25, you’d have a 50% response rate.
- Response time – an average of how long it takes to respond to your audience.
Evaluate Your Worst & Best Performers
Once you have precise data on which channels are performing well and which aren’t, you’ll have a vital insight into improving your marketing strategy. You’ll be able to utilise channels with high referrals or click-throughs to ensure they become the end part of the sales funnel.
You could look at corrective action to ensure that sites with lower impressions are reaching the right customers. Ensuring each part of your multi-channel campaign is an effective part of the sales funnel will ensure that you have a high return on investment (ROI) and generate profit from your campaigns.
Final Thoughts
Analysing marketing strategy is essential for understanding each channel’s role in the customer journey. You may have had a set plan for diverting customers to a sale, but metrics can provide real insight into which parts of your multi-channel marketing campaign are working well.
Once you have clearly defined success criteria for each channel, you can review your data and see whether it performs well. You can also adjust the channel’s role in the customer journey if it performs differently than initially intended. Evaluating your response times and rates can also increase audience engagement with each platform.