Marketing Effectiveness: How to Measure It & Present to External Stakeholders

You can apply marketing strategies all day, but if they aren't effective, those efforts don't matter in the long-term.

Measuring marketing effectiveness is crucial to improving your go-to strategies over time. Are your methods hitting KPIs? Are they helping your clients reach short- and long-term milestones? Use each campaign to learn and grow.

By measuring marketing effectiveness, you can better ensure high ROI or return on marketing investment, ROMI.

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

How do you measure marketing effectiveness? Sure, you can look at traffic or sales metrics, but it goes further than that.

Ultimately, the KPIs you choose to measure can vary by company and strategy. But there are some metrics to pay attention to when measuring marketing effectiveness.

First, when you consider revenue, look into how much of the revenue is a direct result of the marketing efforts. This can help provide clear, high-level insight into how successful the marketing efforts are for the company.

Next, consider pipeline ROI or pipeline growth. Do you continue to generate more and more new leads via your marketing efforts? If not, your marketing effectiveness might be falling flat.

Conversion rates are also a strong KPI to review. Keep in mind that impressions, views and even clicks don't necessarily translate to a successful marketing strategy. If users are clicking but not following through with a purchase, why aren't they converting? Conversion rates can offer a better look at the success of your marketing.

When considering long-term effectiveness, look at retention rates. Are customers sticking around with your company for the long haul, or are they making a few purchases and leaving? Don't forget to continue marketing to ongoing customers while also reaching new audiences.

Marketing Effectiveness Metrics

The types of metrics you consider can also vary by medium. Marketing efforts used to center on tangible but harder to measure media, like billboards, magazines, or television.

Today, digital marketing is front-and-center, and with it comes a wide array of things to measure to determine effectiveness. Here are three top marketing segments and metrics to consider for each.

1. Social Media Marketing Effectiveness

Social media marketing is newer to the scene, but it can be huge for company revenue and lead generation. Measuring marketing effectiveness on social media is pretty straightforward.

It's easy to track the number of inquiries or leads through gated content on social media, and engagement can also be tracked through reposts/shares, comments, and follower count.

Conversion rate plays a role here too. If your account has a high follower count but comparatively low engagement rates, you can start investigating where to tailor your social marketing strategy for improved engagement, leads and revenue.

2. Content Marketing Effectiveness

Content marketing is vast, with options to market through a website, videos, articles, courses, and other digital content. The goal is not to say, “Hey, purchase my product and engage with my brand!” but rather to provide valuable, informational content for customers.

Because there are so many methods for content marketing, measuring effectiveness can vary widely depending on the source at hand. You might check conversion rates from your website to your paid online course, or you might consider engagement with your informational video or webinar.

3. Email Marketing Effectiveness

Email marketing is thriving. There are a number of metrics to consider when measuring email marketing effectiveness. First, you can review delivery, open, and click-through rates.

High delivery rates means your emails are reaching inboxes, but don't depend solely on this metric. Open rates are important, as a low open rate can reveal that you need to focus on writing shorter, more intriguing subject lines.

Of these three, click-through rates are arguably the most important. Are potential customers clicking on links in the email, or are they opening it and then deleting the email? Click-through rates offer a higher chance of converting to revenue. Conversion rate is, again, important here and can help gauge marketing effectiveness for emails, content, social and traditional marketing methods.

How To Present Marketing Effectiveness

So you know how to measure marketing effectiveness, but how do you best share this information with external stakeholders? An insightful marketing report can show clients exactly how impactful last quarter's marketing campaign was on business.

These metrics can also be used in requesting a higher marketing budget or determining strategies for the future.

Here's how to prepare your presentation, from the data to include and how to organize it to truly show marketing effectiveness.

Data to Include

Typically, a marketing report will review quarterly campaigns. First, you want to include the goals of the marketing strategy for that quarter to measure the actual results against the expected outcomes. Include all methods of marketing, such as content, social and/or email, and their accompanying KPIs.

Also, include market research to identify the target audience within the report and ensure external stakeholders know why your strategy addresses this specific audience through these specific methods.

The aforementioned KPIs like conversion rates, social engagement, revenue as it relates to marketing campaigns, click-through rates for emails, and customer retention rates can all be included in the report for external stakeholders.

Organizing the Presentation

The presentation should be a sensible roadmap, starting with the goals and expected outcomes and leading through the metrics measured for each type of marketing. Goals can include traffic numbers, revenue, customer satisfaction, or lead generation.

Organize metrics by social, email, content, and any other inbound or outbound marketing types you pursued over the quarter. You can also note specific goals and results for each type of marketing.

Don't forget to include explanations. Share what is doing well, and why; also outline what is underperforming, why, and how you plan to tackle that next quarter.

KPIs to Prove Effectiveness

Again, KPIs are crucial to share with external stakeholders, as they will clearly showcase marketing effectiveness.

For content marketing, show lead generation, conversion rates, bounce rates, and even SEO-related metrics like page rank on the search engine results page (SERP).

Email marketing should outline delivery, open and click-through rates. You can also analyze bounce rate, both emails that bounced back from unavailable email addresses and from your website's pages that include email signups. Additional email marketing KPIs to consider are the number of emails sent, new subscribers for the quarter and unsubscribes per email sent.

Social media insights can also focus on lead generation and engagement rates. As social continues to develop, some revenue rates will be gauged directly from social, as platforms add shopping functions.

Measure Marketing Effectiveness To Inform Goals

You might spend weeks pouring energy into an email marketing campaign that just doesn't generate the leads you had expected while leads are pouring in through social despite a lack of focused efforts there.

Without reviewing and analyzing your marketing strategies, it's hard to know where to best channel your time, creative energy, and budget to continue boosting your pipeline and revenues.

Marketing effectiveness uses key metrics to identify high and low points of your marketing strategies, so you can share this information with external stakeholders and better inform future strategies and goals.