How To: Measure the Effectiveness of your Marketing Campaign

As a final expense insurance agency or a local funeral home we know you don’t have a bottomless marketing budget. Therefore, it is important that your marketing campaigns get the biggest bang for your buck. We know there are lots of angles with which to approach marketing, but we’re only going to discuss outbound marketing (like direct mail, TV and radio ads, cold calling) and inbound marketing (such as social media, email blasts, web visibility).

Outbound Marketing Campaigns

1. Plan your campaign. In order to measure its effectiveness, your marketing team needs to make plans and predict the outcome. Decide your margins of expected return, what would be too little for the cost, and a timeline of when directly related inquiries should be coming in.
2. Track changes in revenue. The only way to track your campaign’s effectiveness is to compare revenue from before the campaign to whatever changes you see after. Tracking how customers hear about your services will measure how effective your visibility is. We’ve taken Kendra Lee’s Five Metrics to Gauge Outbound Marketing Campaign Success and listed them below. For more details, see her complete article at the link above.   
   1. Revenue directly impacted by marketing campaign
   2. Revenue and quantity of net new customers
   3. Revenue growth in existing customers
   4. Pipeline growth
   5. Media interaction
3. Survey your customers. One simple question: how did you hear about us? For outbound campaigns like direct mail and cold calling, clients may not naturally think to let you know how they came across your services. Since preneed insurance marketing includes a lot of education, viable potential clients will probably have done some research before contacting you. Which leads us to…

Inbound Marketing Campaigns

1. Plan your campaign. Just like outbound campaigns, internet marketing can be planned, including the outcomes. Predict what you expect and desire your campaign to return. Your timeline for online marketing should be different from outbound campaigns, but it’s just as important to outline.
2. Define the channels you want to track. According to Cleverism’s article titled How to Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns, there are seven channels you may want to track. Read more about them at the link above.
   1. Direct–clients who find you by interacting directly with your marketing.
   2. Referral–clients who find you through a past customer or someone who has interacted directly with your marketing.
   3. Organic–clients who find your services when searching for them online.
   4. Email–clients who find you through your email campaigns.
   5. Paid–clients who find you through an advertisement you paid for.
   6. Social–clients who find you through social media outlets.
   7. Other–clients who find you through some other means.
3. Define your metrics and measure your campaign. For inbound marketing, there are many online tools that can be used to do this, including the easy-to-use Google Analytics.  Denis Pinsky for Forbes Magazine wrote a great article called Measuring Content Marketing about real user engagement that breaks down what types of engagement your marketing campaigns may bring.