As we all know, marketing is the lifeblood of a successful business; it helps boost engagement and propel growth. However, there’s no point in running marketing campaigns if you can’t measure their effectiveness. Creating a report that identifies, evaluates, and analyses performance is essential to receiving insights that will help guide future channel prioritisation.
Requirements
In an ideal world, you will already have a large amount of information at your disposal, but you will also need to do a bit of digging to ensure you have all the required pieces to put together an excellent report. The more thorough your data, the more effective it is, so taking the time to do your research and gather as much information as possible can help ensure your marketing has the desired effects. You will need three main pieces of information:
Company Profile & Research
When putting together a company profile, consider your target customers. Gaining a deep understanding of who they are, including their demographics, psychographics, economics, etc., can help you customise your offerings and set yourself in the best position for success. It’s also vital to research your traditional and emerging competitors to stay current and meet your customer’s expectations.
Business & Marketing Objectives/KPI’s
Knowing your business’s objectives helps you stay on track and see if you’re meeting all your goals. You should set an overall objective that outlines the broad plan of your company and a marketing objective that hones in on what you’d like to achieve through each marketing campaign. I prefer using the RACE framework since it provides a measurable strategy that is simple to follow. The RACE framework utilises various channels to engage with and target customers, including paid, earned and owned media. These channels include digital channels such as your website, and social media accounts, as well as more traditional means such as print and audio advertising.
Marketing Channel Analysis
Analysing which marketing channel works best for you helps ensure you don’t waste time or resources and only use the most effective marketing means for your business. Begin by reviewing each channel and its performance against emerging and traditional competitors, then map out the data into a large channel matrix or create a written list.
Reviewing Against Objectives
Reviewing against objectives is the most critical part and tells you whether the current marketing activities meet their goals or not. The process should begin using an objective matrix, which maps channels against objectives to identify successes and failures.
Marketing Channel Prioritisation
Now that you have reviewed the performance of channels, it is now time to prioritise. We use ICE Scoring, a fast process that assigns a numerical value to different channels to prioritise them based on their importance, using three specific parameters: Impact, Confidence, and Ease. You should prioritise channels with higher scores over those with lower ones since they have the highest impact on your customers and will yield the best results. Once you’ve chosen your most impactful channels, focus your marketing campaigns on them and see how it helps propel your business forward.