Measuring the success of your marketing campaigns helps you determine what you’re doing right and what you can improve upon. There is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy for associations. Let's talk about why it's important to track metrics.
Measuring the success of your marketing campaigns helps you determine what you’re doing right and what you can improve upon. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for every association, which is why it’s important to track metrics that align with your association's specific goals.
You’ll want to make sure your job board provides insightful analytics that will help you measure engagement rates based on your target personas. Measuring activity based on target personas lets you know who is using your platform more frequently and identifies new opportunities to engage other personas. Here are a few key engagement metrics you’ll want to consider adding into your calculations.
Tracking the number of new job seeker registrations is an important success metric to track when analyzing marketing campaigns. You want to get your members to use your career center, so knowing the number of new registrations after running an email campaign or social media advertisement helps you measure success, or understand what you can do better next time. You can also use job seeker registration numbers to identify new marketing opportunities.
For example, if you notice a good amount of your members are interested in director level positions, you can send them information about certifications and courses for them to take that will make them a more competitive candidate.
Continually improving the number of employers registered is critical to the success of your career center. If you don’t grow then actively market to employers, you will lose out on new engagement and revenue opportunities. When your career center has high employer engagement rates, it tells you that your career center is a valuable resource to companies and they are finding highly qualified candidates for their open positions.
Planning marketing campaigns geared towards employers needs can help you increase those numbers and attract more employers to your job board. Marketing to employers also opens up new opportunities to increase revenue. You can offer better visibility options on your site, ad space in newsletter emails and digital recruitment guides and much more to grow your career center.
Measuring activity on your career center also gives you insight into how successful your marketing efforts are. The activity you’ll want to track is the amount of time spent on your platform, links users have clicked on, login frequency (time of day, day of week, etc.), and whether it's accessed on desktop or mobile devices. Platform activity tells you how valuable your career center is to users. If they spend a lot of time on it, it signals that your marketing initiatives are working and your users have found what they’re looking for. Knowing what devices your members are logging in on is very important to how you carry out marketing campaigns. You need to make sure that emails you send are easily accessible on mobile devices and optimize other programs for mobile use. If the majority of your target audiences access your resources on mobile devices, but your assets are not optimized for it, you risk decreasing engagement and platform activity.
Since your career center and learning management system go hand-in-hand, knowing the number of course registrations let’s you know if your marketing campaigns are resonating with your members. Your members are career driven and are looking at potential job opportunities almost everyday, which means they see the qualifications they need to obtain to advance to the next level. High course registration numbers lets you know your marketing campaigns are successful and attracting the audience you want.
Many associations host annual events - virtual and live - to create networking opportunities for their members. Event registration numbers are a good indicator of how well your career center is performing, as well as your marketing strategy. For events, you’ll have a few different audience registrations to measure: members, employers and vendors/sponsors. Each one will tell you how well your marketing efforts that were directed towards them performed. If you have high numbers of members attending, but low employer numbers, that lets you know you need to focus more on marketing to companies looking to hire.
If you host a virtual event, you have the option to expand your outreach beyond your members. This is where the option for a digital recruitment guide can be extremely beneficial to your marketing plan since you can distribute your digital guide to a wider audience. When you reach a wider audience, you have the opportunity to increase engagement and traffic to your career center, and ultimately improve your marketing strategy.
Success has been talked about a lot in this post, but that’s not to say failure is all bad or you should give up after you don’t see the numbers you wanted. Failure has its place in measuring success because it tells you what you need to improve upon. Whether it was your messaging or your promotion plan, there’s always an opportunity to fix your mistakes and improve on future campaigns. To access part one of this blog series - Understanding Your Plan, click here.
Next week, part three of the series will be available and will discuss crafting marketing messages directed towards your target personas.
