As a marketer, it is your duty to understand what turns a good campaign into a great campaign.
Good campaigns use highly targeted outreach to acquire or retain more customers, resulting in outcomes like increased sales or a lift in brand equity. Many marketers are satisfied with this level of success – they chalk them up as a victory and move onto their next campaign idea.
But orchestrating a great campaign requires a drive to improve. Good could always become great. And to find opportunities to become better, marketers must closely examine successful campaigns and find new ways to make them improve performance.
If you’re one of the 46 percent of marketers that don’t use marketing analytics to support your campaign strategy, getting started might be difficult. It’s best to follow a step-by-step approach, often with the support of a marketing performance measurement solution.
If you’re looking for ways to elevate your existing campaigns through marketing analytics, you’ve come to the right page. Let’s examine each step markets should take to create excellent, optimized campaigns.
1. Analyze Your Existing Strategy
If you’d like to optimize an existing campaign, start with an analysis of its historic performance. This will help you determine what aspects of the campaign worked well, and which parts need improvement. Start by asking yourself the following questions:
- What was the purpose of this campaign? Did it fulfill that purpose?
- What metrics did we use to measure this campaign’s strengths and weaknesses?
- Which channel was the campaign conducted on? Was that the best choice?
- Who was the target audience? Did it resonate with them?
- Was the overall marketing impact of this campaign positive or negative?
Don’t answer these questions using your gut – instead, use a marketing performance measurement solution to see what the data says. For example, if your campaign was targeted toward women aged 30-45 in New York City, but you received more engagement and revenue from women aged 45-55 in the same geographic area, that’s an indication to pivot your intended audience.
Keep in mind the answer won’t always be crystal clear, and you shouldn’t anchor yourself to a certain strategy without a little experimentation. If you think a certain part of your campaign should be changed, prepare to create two or more hypotheses about what should be changed, then use A/B testing to discover the most plausible answer.
2. Choose an Objective
Once you’ve taken a deep dive into your previous campaign, determine if you will need to make any fundamental changes to its objectives. For example, would you prefer to use the campaign to build brand awareness? How about increasing engagement among existing customers? Or would you like to encourage customers to make an immediate purchase?
Choosing a key objective will help you focus on activities that give you the results you need. From there, you can determine the KPIs and metrics that will best support your chosen goal.
3. Identify Relevant KPIs and Metrics
Once you’ve settled on an objective, start finding the relevant KPIs and marketing metrics that will support it. This will help you break down the pieces that form a successful campaign and while allowing you to track goal progress on a granular level.
Here are a few general KPIs that you could use to support your campaigns:
- Net Sales – How many sales did you generate during the campaign term?
- Clicks – How many people clicked on a digital advertisement?
- Impressions – How many people saw a touchpoint within your campaign?
- Conversions – How many people took a desired action after seeing a campaign touchpoint?
- Cost Per Acquisition – How much marketing spend was required to acquire one customer?
However, these KPIs are rather basic, and often don’t provide a full view into your campaign success. Consider measuring these context-rich performance metrics as well:
- Change in Customer Lifetime Value – Customer lifetime value (CLV) estimates how much a consumer will spend on your brand during their lifetime. If a campaign can increase CLV, even by a small amount, that’s a great measure of performance.
- Churn Rate – Churn rate helps you see when people leave your sales funnel and why. If a campaign is reducing churn, this can be directly tied to future sales.
- Funnel Velocity – Funnel velocity measures quickly customers move through your sales funnel. This means you can get more sales while investing in fewer marketing touchpoints.
- ROMI – Return on marketing investment, also known as ROMI, is the ultimate determinant of campaign success. Tracking ROMI is bound to delight key financial stakeholders, granting you more budget for future campaigns.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to settle for just one KPI. Most goals are supported by multiple KPIs, and they should be tracked in tandem. However, this can be a painstaking process unless you have a marketing performance measurement solution that’s designed to provide multi-KPI optimization.
4. Track Conversions Across Campaigns and Channels
Once you’ve launched your campaign, keep a close eye on how it affects your marketing performance. The best way to do this is to tie your campaign to sales. This is true even if your campaign is focused on reaching consumers that are only beginning the customer journey.
This may seem difficult at first. After all, brands have struggled to directly tie awareness to sales for decades now. The secret, however, lies in leveraging leading indicators. Leading indicators are the building blocks behind many predictive models and can help brands understand the relationship between top- and mid-funnel activities and sales. This will help you assess all of your campaigns based on ROI – a metric that’s much more relevant to those outside of marketing.
5. Form Recommendations to Optimize Your Strategy
After the campaign has been running for a few days, weeks, or months, you can start assessing opportunities for improvement. This might remind you of the first step in this guide – and that’s because optimization is a constant process! However, you can answer new questions and form new recommendations after engaging in the steps outlined here. Consider the following:
- Expectation vs. Reality – Did your campaign meet your goals? Were there any unexpected events that either bolstered or negated your efforts?
- Lessons Learned – If you experimented with a new channel, audience, or objective, were the outcomes positive or negative? How can you use that information to improve your next campaign?
- Shortcomings – Did you lack the time or budget required to help this campaign perform at its highest level? Are there any technologies or strategies you could employ to overcome these challenges?
Once you’re done, communicate your findings to leadership and the rest of the marketing team. Take them through how the campaign started, how you measured success, and how it’s going to help improve your bottom line. Then, come to the table with your recommendations to further improve your strategy.
This step is very important. 31 percent of marketing leaders say one of the top roadblocks to high-quality analytics is unclear recommendations. By breaking down the data into straightforward recommendations, you’ll communicate the value of campaign analysis to everyone.
Conclusion: Cookieless is Here to Stay
Analyzing marketing performance is an ongoing endeavor, but the time spent optimizing your campaigns will be well worth it. As you continuously optimize your campaigns, you’ll learn more about your most valuable customers and how to craft highly relevant messaging for them. So long as your campaigns keep producing new data, the opportunities for optimization are endless.
However, there’s a massive weak-spot facing most marketers. While 70 percent of marketers want to expand their existing data capabilities, 72 percent struggle to find the tools necessary to do so. This makes a methodical analysis of campaign success much more difficult than it needs to be.
It doesn’t have to be that way. With the right technology and expertise, analyzing campaign performance can be easy. A marketing performance measurement solution like Marketing Evolution is designed to cut out the tedious analytics work, and let your team focus on the results that matter. With an intuitive campaign dashboard and advanced capabilities like multi-KPI optimization, your team’s vision of success will quickly become reality.
