How to Evaluate Communications & Marketing Success
There are many ways to evaluate success, and you should always keep your campaign goals in mind. Preferably, you and your team should make a plan to evaluate success prior to the launch of a campaign in order to then tailor the campaign to succeed on your key metrics.
Remember, some evaluation is certainly better than none. If you have limited time to evaluate, that’s OK. Pick an evaluation method you can achieve or ask for help. Contact OUA if you’re evaluating your admissions marketing success or making a plan to do so in the future.
Recommended Methods of Evaluation
- Raw metrics. Take a look at our metrics post, where we detail key aspects of measurement on social media and the web. Then take a look at those key metrics for your campaign.
- Metrics over time. Comparing your year-to-year, cycle-to-cycle, or even month-to-month success can be really helpful. Look at the same point in the calendar in two different admissions cycles at the same time. Are there significant differences? What was different about your communications and marketing efforts? Does that explain the differences in whole or in part?
- Survey your audience. Ask if you’re doing a nice job. What do people like? What do they dislike? Why? What have they experienced in other similar places? OUA’s surveys have been proven really helpful measures of how we are doing.
- Look at key subgroups. If you can break your data down, look at key subgroups that relate to your goals. For example, we might choose to analyze our success in our primary out-of-state markets separately to isolate those important results.
Want to see some examples? Check out our marketing report.