Evaluating The Progress Of Your Marketing Campaign: Artist’s Guide

For artists, having a solid online presence has become essential, but in order to make sure you’re getting the most out of your digital marketing, it’s important to regularly assess your progress. Here, we break down how to evaluate your marketing campaign in order to meet your goals.

Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog

Businesses are finally starting to understand the importance of their online presence and strategizing accordingly. To optimize your digital marketing efforts, you’ll need to analyze your progress as you go and adapt as necessary. To help you out, here’s how to evaluate your marketing campaigns progress to help you meet your goals and excel in the digital marketing landscape.

How to Evaluate the Progress of Your Marketing Campaign

Set Clear Goals

People use digital marketing for many different purposes, so before you start, you should figure out what exactly you want to accomplish with your campaign. Do you want to increase engagement? Increase streams on Spotify? Get more views on your music videos? Each of these objectives requires specific channels to use, tactics to apply, and metrics to set. Because of that, your digital marketing goals should always be specific, measurable, and realistic.

The goals you set should guide you throughout the campaign. Having clear, actionable goals will help you to see what’s working and what isn’t, so you can adjust as you go.

Know Your Metrics

Digital marketing KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) are closely related to the goals and channels you use. For example, measuring brand awareness and audience development practices require sets of completely different metrics. To give you a quick rundown, here are some fundamental ones to keep in mind:

• Overall traffic // The traffic you receive from the digital channels such as social media pages, website, pre-saves, etc.
• Cost-per-click (CPC) // How much you pay for each user’s click on your ads.
  Return on investment (ROI) // Tells you how much you spent on your digital campaign vs. how much you earned.
• DSP traffic // Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple Music, etc. streams, presaves.
• Traffic by source // This tells you what the most effective digital channels are. For example, you can compare the traffic you receive via organic, paid, or social networks.
• Click through rate // The percentage of users that clicked on your link, compared to the total number of users that viewed your page, email, social post, or ad.
• Sessions // The interactions with your social media pages, website, and/or pre-saves a user takes within a specified time frame.
• Merch sales // Revenue made from selling merch online.
• Ticket sales // Revenue earned from selling tickets to shows via whatever platform you use to sell tickets to your shows.
• Social reach // How many people have seen your ad on socials.
• Social engagement // The total number of user interactions with your content, including their clicks, likes, shares, comments, etc.
• Impressions // The total number of times your ad is displayed, no matter if it is clicked or not.

There are many others out there, but realistically, you don’t even need to use every single one of the metrics listed above. Choose which ones relate to your campaigns goals and go from there. Choose accordingly and be honest with yourself. Data doesn’t lie!

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Sharpen your skills…

Marketing Strategies You Should Know as a Musician

How to Put Together a Marketing Plan

5 Email Marketing Metrics You Need to Know

7 Key Video Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Content

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Use the Tools Available to You

After you’ve decided which metrics you want to focus on, it’s time to find the tools that will help you monitor your results. Once again, the tools you use depend on your specific needs. For example, for website analytics and search engine optimization, Google Analytics offers a solid foundation. Chartmetric, Spotify Ad Studio, Soundcharts, and FeaturedFM are also useful tools to keep in mind.

When it comes to socials, there are tons of social media analytics tools to help you out. Most social networks have their own analytics features, like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics, etc., but they’re not the only ones. You can also use tools like Later.com and Sprout Social to measure the success of your social campaigns.

However, there is one thing to keep in mind… To measure the success of a multi-channel campaign, you will need to track a wide range of metrics using a wide range of tools and dashboards, not just one.

Set a Clear, Measurable Time Frame

Regardless of if you’re creating a huge multi-channel campaign or a much smaller one, the only way to really assess your progress is to understand your time frame and work efficiently to meet those goals. Timing is everything.

For example, if the goal of your campaign is to boost conversion rates by 6% in six months, that’s a perfectly clear, reasonable goal. That being said, if you notice that your conversion rates have increased only 2% during that period, that’s a very clear indicator that your tactics need to be reevaluated.

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Learn more….

How to Measure Social Media Using Google Analytics

Instagram Stories Analytics: The Metrics You Need To Know

Symphonic Staff Picks: Favorite Tools for Project Management

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Be Consistent

As your campaign moves along, it’s your job to keep it running smoothly by adjusting your strategy as needed. As you progress, you’ll learn new skills and get more data and metrics to work with along the way. All this will help you optimize your efforts as the digital landscape changes and help you fix performance issues as they arise. The key is not to just set it and forget it. Just like anything else, your campaign needs love and attention to grow.

Based on your data, you can map out everything you need to do in advance to meet whatever goals you have in mind. This marketing plan should include a solid timeline of each step you need to meet along the way, that way you can clearly see your progress and communicate what needs to be done to the rest of your team and optimize your efforts.

In Conclusion…

Digital marketing is a unique process for everyone. Your strategy depends on your specific goals, and there’s no “one size fits all” approach. Setting clear and actionable goals, utilizing the tools available to you, and understanding the ever-changing digital landscape will be your guides to success. Good luck!