Think about it… anytime you make a purchase, it’s because you had a certain degree of information about the product you were buying. You may have read reviews, received a recommendation from a friend, or saw an ad that caught your eye. Bottom line, you generally had some type of information or were influenced in some way to make that purchasing decision.
Creating and executing a marketing campaign is no different from that personal purchase—the more information you have, the more likely you will see success. The inverse is also true: the less information you have, the more risk you invite into achieving your business goals. For example, when you’re looking to invest money into a marketing campaign, you want your message to reach the people most likely to be customers. Any communication you send without a clear understanding of the audience you’re targeting might be time, effort, and money wasted.
Sometimes the information you need to make the best decisions is easy to get hold of and other times it takes careful tracking and measuring of your successes (and failures) to learn and improve upon for future sales.
So what’s a business to do? Avoid launching your campaigns blindly, of course! One way to do that is by using the insights dashboard that powers Taradel’s Mapfire. It helps you make the best decisions at all phases of your marketing campaign: pre, during, and post-launch. After all, as the old adage goes, what gets measured gets improved.
Tracking Data For Your Business
Let’s first talk about some general tracking tips when designing and deploying your marketing campaign. Access to data can help you realize what might make your product or service sell better, and it can offer you insight into your customer base. This is where it’s important to have an idea of what information you want to look for at each phase of any marketing campaign.
Pre-Launch Campaign Planning
As you organize your campaign, you want to gather what you already know and start making predictions. After all, a marketing campaign is really a hypothesis, and only your data can prove it correct or incorrect. So at this phase, the focus is on deciding where you’re starting from. As a small to medium business (SMB), you might need different marketing campaigns depending on the scale or geographic target of your efforts and the audience you want to reach.
The important part here is to not fall into analysis paralysis. Before the campaign, focus on making your best guesses with the information you have, identifying the key metrics you will need to track for actionable insights (phone calls, clicks, etc.), and then embrace the fact that you’ll learn and have more to work with for next time.
Launch Time: During the Campaign
Once you start running digital ads or search listings, sending out emails, or distributing physical mailer campaigns, you can immediately start tracking engagement depending on your tools. Ads count impressions and clicks with organized data, emails track opens and click-throughs, and the results of your physical campaigns can be tracked through specific phone numbers (call tracking) or links.
If this is your first campaign, you may want to consider taking a “test and learn” approach by A/B testing during this phase (for example, you can test ad creatives, ad copy, email subject lines, different mailers, etc.) to see what’s grabbing your audience’s attention and turning it into action. Then, once you have more data and insights on hand, you can go bigger and broader knowing you have figured out your secret sauce to capturing the attention of the right people with the right message.
Post-Campaign Evaluation
Once a campaign is finished and you have the results in hand, you’ll be able to draw valuable insights from the data. Now is the time for honest reflection about what went right with the campaign, what hiccups you ran into, and what to apply to future efforts. Ideally, your tracking helps adjust your local campaigns to further your business goals in the future.
Looking for a primer on how to plan out a campaign like this? Check out our How to Create a Local Advertising Campaign article for all the details!
How Does Taradel Track the Results of Your Marketing Campaign?
Just like we mentioned at the beginning, the thing to remember is that what gets measured gets improved. If you send out your marketing campaign but do nothing with the lessons you learned, you can’t expect your next campaign to see better results—but with the right data in hand it’s easy to optimize.
What your business needs are tools that make tracking these metrics easy and clearly understandable. Sometimes all that information is overwhelming, which can make it easy to put off the organizational and analytical effort for another day.
With our all-in-one marketing app, you have a toolbox created from the ground up to help you design a digital or physical marketing campaign, adjust the details of your tracking, and gather all that information in a way that makes it easy to measure results, make adjustments, and achieve your business goals.
Taradel’s built-in reporting dashboard monitors the results of your campaign through various trackers and triggers in your campaign:
All you need to do is plug in the campaign information: your budget, demographic data, desired zip code, etc. And the platform helps you set up and launch multichannel marketing campaigns by providing easy-to-use heatmaps directing you where your marketing will most likely succeed.
How Campaign Insights Change Your Business Results
With Taradel’s battle-tested platform at your fingertips, you have organizational tools that help you improve every marketing campaign you run. And the more you play with your tools and create new marketing campaigns with your learnings in mind, the more improvement you’ll see.
Like we said in the beginning: the more information you have, the more likely you are to succeed. As you gain greater insights from each marketing campaign, you’ll gain momentum in achieving your business goals and growing your business.
As an SMB, you balance a lot of plates. If tracking your marketing results sounds like a slog, we want you to know that it doesn’t have to be. Try out Mapfire for free today to see just how easy it is to create and track a digital or physical campaign for your business’s next big step.
If you have any questions about Taradel, Mapfire, or our other services, feel free to contact us by phone, chat, or email.