Whether you’re starting a marketing agency or run a bakery, marketing campaigns are important for any business looking to grow and succeed. When executed correctly, they can help add to your customer base by promoting your business, enhancing your brand recognition, and improving your company’s revenue by boosting sales.
Unfortunately, a common problem for many businesses is the lack of budget when it comes to funding marketing campaigns, which is why companies need to measure the effectiveness of the campaign to see if it has been successful and whether it’s beneficial for them to continue with moving forward.
There are platforms like Whatagraph that can analyse data in a real-time, giving you an overview of the campaign and insights into how it is performing. Being able to monitor the progress of a campaign with a tool like this allows the relevant people within your organisation to view and interpret the data.
In this blog post, we’re going to look into the different types of marketing campaigns and discuss the ways your business can use tools to track and analyse the effectiveness of the campaign.
What are the different types of marketing campaigns?
When it comes to marketing campaigns, most will fall under one of two categories; inbound marketing or outbound marketing.
So what is the difference between the two? Well, inbound marketing relies on people’s interests and allows customers to get information as and when they want it. In recent years, inbound marketing has become the popular choice out of the two and has proven to be more successful. Whereas outbound marketing is seen as more traditional, and tends to push products and services on customers and is sometimes referred to as interruption marketing because of the approach that is taken.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing allows you to promote your business through different forms of content such as search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing, infographics, eBooks, blog posts, and social media to name a few. Below we explain how each one can get potential customers on your website.
- SEO
Good SEO practices will allow your content to be more visible on search engine result pages (SERPs) like Google and Bing. Link-building campaigns are a good way to move up on the organic ranks, by obtaining links to your site from other reputable sites.
- Email Marketing
Good email marketing campaigns will include a well-written subject line, focused, and informative content with a specific call-to-action (CTA). It should be designed with the user in mind, generating customer interest organically.
- Infographics
Quite often people want to be able to digest big chunks of information and data quickly and the best way to do this is through infographics. They can be presented in an aesthetically pleasing design and can generate a buzz and get people sharing.
- eBooks
An advantage of using an eBook is that it can develop your brand as a thought-leader within your industry by displaying your knowledge and it allows you to exchange contact information when downloading the eBook.
- Blog Posts
Posting regular articles to your company blog and making this a priority can see up to 13x more positive ROI for your business. By being consistent and creating educational blogs that are of interest to your customers, you can help drive traffic to your website and become a trusted brand in your industry.
- Social Media
Video content is a great way to get bite-sized content in front of the right audience and is engaging and effective. People scrolling through social media want to see videos and it helps bring your brand to life. Videos that get the most engagement are generally around one minute to two minutes long.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing examples include print, broadcast, direct mail, and telemarketing. Below we explain how each one of these can work for your business.
This refers to any print material made for distribution like newspaper/magazine ads, brochures, posters, and newsletters and can help to promote your products and services.
- Broadcast
TV and radio adverts are still a popular choice and are beneficial for all types of business. This form of advertising gains the viewers’ and listeners’ attention and allows you to push your products and services.
- Direct Mail
Direct marketing like flyers catalogs and letters are a great way to reach out to your audience and get their attention. It allows you to connect with your customers on a personal level.
- Telemarketing
Outbound sales calls or cold calls as they’re often referred to, are calling existing and potential customers and delivering sales messages to essentially convince consumers to buy a product or service.
How can you measure the effectiveness of your campaign?
Once you’ve decided on the type of marketing campaign you want to use, you need to decide how you want to track it. This involves looking at the traffic and whether it’s organic, direct, social, referral, email, or paid. Next, you need to outline the metrics you want to measure like individual visitors, page views, click-through rate, bounce rate, and engagement on social media.
When your campaign is live you can measure its search progress through Google Analytics to see where your site is ranking on Google and you can also track conversions on pay-per-click (PPC) ads. If you’re pushing the campaign out on social media, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have built-in analytics of your social posts.
Although you can use Google Analytics and built-in social analytics, you can also use tools like Whatagraph which can help you pull all this data together in a real-time dashboard so you can keep track of how the campaign is running.
You can also measure your campaign’s effectiveness through print adverts and other media by setting up vanity URLs and tracking codes within the ad that leads those customers to a specific landing page. With businesses lacking the budget to roll out marketing campaigns all the time, it’s important to make use of the tools available to track and monitor the effectiveness of campaigns to analyse the results. Even if the campaign isn’t a success, the results produced in the report may still be of value to determine the next approach of the business.
