-Marketing

Coughlin’s Law – “Improvement comes from knowing how well you did yesterday and what you will do  differently today.”

Marketing is something that every organization has to do no matter what size you are.  Even if your plan is simply word of mouth.  Marketing Campaigns need to be managed and reviewed to see if it is the best plan and where you can make adjustments.

Some basic questions need to be answered so you can see how effective your are being.  At one time, success was measured by:

• How many people reTweeted your Tweet
• How many people like your Facebook fan page
• How many people subscribe to your blog
• How big is your mailing list

Now marketers are realizing that while those numbers are important, the ones that are of interest to the business side are :

• How many people took some action based on your campaign
• How many people signed up for a trial or demo
• How many people made a phone call
• How many people made a purchase

Without tracking your campaigns, how do you know your successes and your , “well let’s try something different”.  I don’t want to say failure because there are somethings that work and some that don’t but all can be adjusted to work better.

Things to remember when preparing for a new campaign:

• Who is your audience? Should you target people who you think will buy or people who most people want to be like?  Slight distinction but one that needs to be made
• What medium will you use?  140 characters Vs. blog pages.  Big difference.  Where will you find your target audience?  Some industries lend themselves to one medium over the other.
• Will you be launching the same campaign across all mediums at the same time of will there be a wave from one to the next?
• Where will you keep all of this information?  Most CRM systems have a module for marketing and is an excellent place to store your campaign information as well as leads generated from it.
• How to track and measure how well you are doing?  You CRM system might have some reporting capabilities to see how many people have responded to an email campaign (don’t forget to add in the unsubscribe link if using email) but can it track Twitter or Facebook or Blog actions as well?  If not, it is time for some customizations or a new system or a temporary patch until you can bridge the gap.

My suggestions for tracking are going to be ones you can do for free or on the cheep.  Customizations and new systems are large topics on their own and this will get your started.

1. Start off with creating a tracking code system, a naming convention, on how you will track your campaigns.  This should be a few characters long so you can include the same “token” in all of your campaigns or be able to add onto it based on media.  For example a campaign on your new organic beeswax lip balm product could be – OBLB – which you could use in all of your campaigns or add onto it by adding say a TW for Twitter – OBLBTW.  Now you know that that “token” is for your organic beeswax lip balm campaign and someone found you on Twitter.
2. Make sure you have analytics set up on your website and your analytics package has the ability to track campaigns by your “token”.  Google Analytics is a good example.  You will be driving people back to your website most of the time so this is where you will track them.  You will want to have this set up in advance, so you will know what a typical day’s web traffic looks like.  This is a just in case the person does not keep the tracking “token” when they come to your site.
3. Landing pages are a good idea as well.  For each campaign, create a custom tailored page to reinforce your message.  Once on your site, they might navigate around but the landing page will be your best shot to keep them there and help them take action.
4. For our “on the cheep” solution, we need a calendar.  On our calendar we will mark off days we have blogged, Tweeted, emailed and anything to do with the campaign and then also the campaign “token”.  This will be our “mashup” location.  Although your analytics package will be tracking everyone coming to your site and from which campaign they got there, unless you modify each “token” for each Tweet or posting it will be hard to determine which message worked best.  Being able to match up your calendar of actions to your analytics charts will give you some real insight into your work.  Now you will have an idea what is working and then can adjust that message and “token” to get more accurate information.
5. Sign up for Hootsuite Pro.  It is not that expensive but does allow you to adjust your shortened url to include your tracking “token”.  You can do this in the custom URL parameters.  Using #hashtags is another way to track your Twitter campaign but will not come through to your website analytics.  The Pro suite also allows your team to tweet from the same account and have “assignments”.  There are many other features to the Pro version and all worth it.
6. Facebook has many, many different options to track who is on your Fan page and how much time they spend there.  If you are tracking activity on your Facebook page and getting activity, then you need to add some “call to actions” on your Facebook page.  have your fans take action there instead of then forwarding them onto your website to do the same.  The benefit here?  In Facebook you will know who the person is with out filling out forms.  You can track their activity back to their user account –> the “holy grail” of analytics.

That should get your started.  This topic could and probably should cover many postings so check back for updates or better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed now.

Got a favorite tool for tracking marketing campaigns?  Let’s hear about it.

Photo by Tiffany Day

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1. CRM Features You Should Have
2. Taking Service to the Customer – Social Media CRM
3. Social Customer Teamwork
4. Know the cool crowd and how they are good for business
5. Change of seasons – What happened to the conversation?