3 Ways to Quantify Marketing Success

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Early in your career, especially if you are in marketing, it can be difficult to quantify ROI. However, if you have a marketing budget, chances are you will be asked to report on spend. Here's a super simple framework on how to approach measuring something like this: 

1. Make a Plan. Do not expend energy on a project without developing some way of tracking the performance of it. HubSpot is a great tool to do this, as it gives you detailed analytics on web pages, email campaigns, blogs, and even social media messages. That's just one tool, though: for hosting events, measure registrations and attendees. If you publish a blog, measure page views or leads generated. Launch a podcast? Look at number of downloads. Figure out how you want to measure your initiative, and bonus points if you can put a number to attribute to success. (i.e., I am going to aim for 10k podcast downloads before the end of the year) 
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2. Execute. This may sound obvious, but sometimes you can spend all your time planning and talking about what you COULD do without actually...doing anything. Even if it's something small to get started or to run a test, make sure you actually make something happen. It shows initiative, and regardless of success or failure, I guarantee you will learn something from it. 

3. Report on Results. Whatever you planned to measure, create a report of results. Did it perform how you expected? Why or why not? What did you learn to apply for next time? This will give you guidance for your next campaign, where you'll tweak your plan and start over again. Reporting on everything also is a good practice to get into as it will be easy to reference when needed (and you will need to report on performance eventually, whether at the end of the quarter or the year), but serve as a helpful way to update your resumé

The Bottom Line
Draft a plan, execute the campaign, then record your results. Share them with your boss (or the broader team, like colleagues or even the CEO). Not only does this quantify the value you bring to the organization, but can serve as valuable fodder for building up your LinkedIn profile or resumé.

For more tips, checkout this LinkedIn article I wrote a while back on how to be a rockstar at work based on a lecture I gave at Tufts University.