Primary Times - the definitive what’s on and where to go family guide of activities and events for children of primary school age. Things to do with your kids during the school holidays including arts and craft activities, music and theatre for children, parties, competitions, days out, and family attractions along with term time drama schools, dance classes, after school clubs and sports activities. Things to do at a place near you!
Marketing Tips | June
Tip 6 - Measure the important things
There is so much data available to marketers. But data for data’s sake won’t move your marketing forward. Measure data that is directly related to your overall goals and be prepared to make changes if you aren’t getting the results you need.
Measure what matters
There is a swathe of data available to marketers and business owners, but what do you really need to measure?
Well, the answer to that depends on what your marketing goals are and what you want to achieve for your business.
If you’ve set SMART marketing goals, knowing what to measure should be straightforward as it will be detailed in your marketing goals. If you haven’t, we’ve written a useful guide on how to do this here.
How do you measure your overall marketing performance?
Let’s assume you are an arts venue and you’ve set a marketing goal to sell the maximum number of tickets for your family-focused theatre and arts events. You have created an integrated marketing plan that covers digital and print and targets families with children. It’s relatively straightforward to measure digital marketing performance, but what about print advertising?
As a print publisher, we get asked this a lot by our advertisers. Our advice is to ensure your advert can be measured. We’ve all heard Henry Ford’s famous quote ‘Half my advertising is a waste, I just don’t know which half’. Well, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are steps you can take to measure print advertising performance:
Create a unique landing page
If you’re driving readers to your website, set up a unique URL for your campaign and measure the performance of this landing page. You’ll know how successful your ad is by the number of unique visits to the landing page. You’ll also glean insight as to how strong the marketing message or offer is by how many people go on to buy tickets (the conversion).
Use a unique telephone number
If you want people to call you, then it’s a good idea to create a unique phone number for your print advert. It’s quite simple to do this, there are many companies that can provide you with a batch of phone numbers to use for specific campaigns, Response Tap is one. This way you can attribute responses directly to your print adverts.
Have a cut-out coupon or special offer code
Our advertisers get the best results when they include an offer or a cut-out coupon for readers. Either a cut-out coupon that readers can bring to your venue to receive a discount or an offer code for them to use when booking online (or both). This is an excellent way of measuring campaign response, but it will also boost your advert performance.
Make sure you have a compelling offer and a strong call to action
Your advert needs to appeal to your audience and the action you want them to take needs to be clear. A good offer (whether that’s a discount code or a time-limited offer) can make the difference from a decent campaign to a fantastic campaign! And this is true of every channel, print and digital.
Multiple touchpoints
You need to think about the different stages your audience goes through before they become customers. The first stage is awareness of your brand, moving to interest in what you have to offer, followed by a desire for your product and service, and finally action (the conversion).
It will take several interactions with your brand across all channels before a customer moves from awareness to action. That’s why we always recommend clients take out a series of adverts in Primary Times, alongside other marketing activities (digital and offline).
And sometimes because there are multiple touchpoints, your customer might respond to a Facebook post or an email campaign, but actually, the awareness will have been built up by the print advert and recommendations from friends. It can be hard to attribute the exact campaign method that generated the action. This is why it’s so important to run sustained and integrated promotional campaigns.
Measuring what counts
Einstein says it best ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’
So, focus on the data that will help you achieve your business goals. And don’t just measure the data. Analyse and use the insights to improve your marketing. Whether it’s a slight tweak to campaign creative or a channel shift. If the data is showing that you’re not going to achieve your marketing goals, you will need to take action to get things back on track.