Everyone answers to someone else, right? Marketing managers answer to the customer, sure. Today’s consumer – driven environment demands that a Marketing team actively engage with its customers through the internet and social media. Its imperative that a Marketing team remain aware of their brand’s reputation. However, Marketing managers must also answer to their Executives. Each corporation’s high-ranking decision makers have to be able to see a Marketing manager’s strategies in order to improve the bottom line. To realize a strategy, a good marketer must outline what specific endeavors, or goals, will be tracked to measure success in a campaign.
As we previously learned, using the SMART method can aid you in a developing a strong Marketing plan. If an overall goal is to boosts sales year over year, for example, strategies to do so would be to increase customer engagement and increasing brand awareness. Tactics to support these strategies would be examples such as 1) assigning team members to monitor your brand mentions on social media outlets and, if your brand is mentioned, actively engaging with online users to drive them towards sales. Interacting with customers will help increase brand awareness.
Establishing goals to boost sales, improve customer awareness of your brand or increase customer engagement all are effective ideas to increase a company’s profit. How does the team go about doing this? A strategy must be devised to attack these initiatives. To develop a solid strategy, though, one must understand his or her overall goals and objectives first. These goals can be measured via KPIs.
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are the tangible, quantitative measurements in which Executives will be seeking. Marketing Managers must have KPIs set when the overall goals are being established. They are set goals created to help track and measure the Marketing team’s performance in certain campaign. As mentioned above, examples of KPIs in the marketing world would areas such as: web traffic sources, click-through rate and brand awareness.
The web traffic sources KPI basically refers to how visitors land onto your site. They could be getting to the website via search, a referral from a friend, a marketing campaign or going there directly. Measuring how prospective buyers access your site will help drive further initiatives on selling to them what they are seeking. Brand awareness, as one would guess, explains how often your brand is mentioned and searched. Click – through – rates, or CTRs, measure how successful an ad has been in capturing users’ attention. The higher the click-through rate, the more successful the ad has been in generating interest. KPIs can be established at the start of a new goal for the company and measured during a specific campaign, and then at the end. Comparing results from start to finish and reporting them will reflect one’s success.
Strategies are essential to help breakdown the overall goals and objectives a Marketing team has been given. Together, they develop tactics to drive towards these goals. Setting KPIs will help measure the team’s success through the life of the campaign and, most importantly, at the end. This ultimately will help establish your path to success as a Marketer.
