How to Define Success for Your Marketing Campaign
Learn how to set KPIs, track campaign performance, and use data-driven insights to optimize your marketing strategy for success.
Setting up marketing campaign metrics
Creating realistic timelines for your campaign
Collecting observations during the campaign period
Reflecting on your marketing campaign
A successful marketing campaign is like a Thanksgiving dinner spread. Your plate is filled with all the necessary ingredients of a healthy marketing ecosystem: digital channels like social media, email marketing, digital ads, and websites, alongside traditional marketing tactics like print ads, flyers, and in-person conferences and events. But what’s a Thanksgiving dinner without dessert? In this case, of course, the pumpkin pie is reporting and analytics.
Arguably one of the most important parts of a marketing campaign, that people often forget, is tracking and reflection for future campaign optimization. Without it, how will you know whether your proposed strategy worked? That said, success looks different campaign to campaign, company to company. The most important thing is to make a plan to measure success from the very beginning of your campaign.
Setting up marketing campaign metrics
As you develop your marketing campaign and determine which channels to use, define which metrics you want to track.
Goals, Objectives, + Key Performance Indicators
The key to figuring out which analytics to track traces back to the original goal of your campaign. Once you have a set goal and objectives, you can determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) will show you an accurate view of your campaign’s results.
If your goal is:
- Lead Generation: Focus on the total number of new qualified leads, engagement on marketing channels, clicks, cost per lead, and return on investment (ROI).
- Brand Awareness: Track views, reach, follower growth, earned media, direct and organic website traffic.
- Increased Sales: Explore conversion rates, revenue growth, engagement rate, abandoned carts, and total sales.
- Remarketing: Collect data on your campaign’s return on ad spend (ROAS), conversion rate, cost per acquisition, and bounce rate.
It’s important to collect KPIs from each marketing channel that’s in use. Often, you can use native platform insights for digital channels, like social media, email marketing, and digital ads. This makes it easy to collect and digest information. For your website, we recommend using Google Analytics to track information like views, active users, and average engagement time.
Traditional channels, like print advertising, can be harder to track. However, even collecting data on the amount of people who received a postcard can be valuable. Think of this like a “view” on social media; how many sets of eyes viewed the postcard because it was in their mailbox?
For print materials with QR codes, always add UTM parameters. This way, you can find out more information about which channels sent people to your website, social media channels, or other links you’re using in your campaign.
Prior to launch, it’s important to have metrics for comparison. Scrape your existing channels to find past content performance, then at the end of the new campaign period, you can compare and contrast. While you can often find “industry standards” that share average metrics for specific channels, we don’t recommend using it as the gospel. It’s better to compare the success of your content to what you’ve created in the past to get the most accurate results. Because no two companies in an industry are exactly the same.
Creating realistic timelines for your campaign
When you launch your campaign, it’s natural to be excited about seeing results. That said, it’s important not to expect change right away. Be sure to give your campaign time to soak in and resonate with your audience, and avoid pulling the plug too early or getting frustrated.
Here are a few different types of campaigns and how long you should allocate to see them “work:”
- Giveaways, Event Promotions, and Limited Time Offers: Four to six weeks. Provide enough time to see results, but don’t let it go on too long that people forget about it. Part of the beauty of these types of campaigns is the limited amount of time people get to be a part of it.
- Seasonal Push: Three months. This includes promoting a seasonal product or service offering, boosting popularity during an off season, or drawing attention during a season that traditionally performs better for your business. Extend these campaigns throughout the entire season to see results.
- Product Launch: Four to eight weeks. Incorporate teasers to get your consumer base excited and promote it once the product comes out without oversaturating users’ feeds.
- General Brand Awareness: Three to six months. Boosting your brand awareness takes time, and it’s likely that you won’t see a return within a week or two. We recommend extending your brand awareness campaign to last three to six months; over this period of time and beyond, you’ll see how the touchpoints you’re employing improve your audience’s awareness of your brand.
- Marketing Ecosystem Development Strategy: One year. Taking a new approach to your marketing strategy as a whole? Give yourself an entire year to let it play out. As you execute this strategy, be agile and consider ways to improve while the content is in action. Take note of everything, successes and mistakes, to see how you can take a new approach the following year.
Collecting observations during the campaign period
In addition to data, take qualitative observation notes during the campaign to add to your reflection. Keep a running document of your thoughts during the process. As humans, we don’t have perfect memories. This will remind you how the campaign felt as it was rolled out, making for a better analysis post-campaign.
Keep track of unique engagements across channels. For example, if there’s a particularly positive comment on a social media post, take a screenshot and add it to your notes document. The more information you can collect, the better.
Mid-campaign adjustment
While you’re consciously making observations, see where you can make tweaks throughout the campaign. One of the biggest advantages to digital marketing is that you can course-correct in real time. Know how to pivot, not just document, in order to build campaign success.
For example, say you send two email blasts during your campaign that have two different subject line approaches. One is flashy and exciting, and the other is to-the-point. The flashy one gets significantly more opens and clicks than the straightforward one, and you have an upcoming email blast that takes the same to-the-point approach. Consider how to make it more like the one that performed better.
When it comes to social media and digital ads, one of our favorite phrases is “riding the wave.” Say you have a social post, like a giveaway, gain a lot of traction, increasing traffic to your page and your follower count. Don’t let your social media account lie dormant once that post goes live, it’s time to ride the wave! Create posts you know will resonate with the same audience, encouraging them to further interact with your content.
Reflecting on your marketing campaign
Once your campaign is complete based on your timeline, it’s time to collect and analyze your data. Look at the KPIs you set at the beginning of the campaign and gather the metrics you need to perform an analysis. How do the numbers compare to your standard metrics or typical content?
How do you feel post-campaign? Did it match, exceed, or fall short of your expectations? Write your thoughts in a post-mortem document. Reference your qualitative observations to help you come up with things that went well and things that you could have done differently. This post-mortem doc will be a wonderful reference for future campaigns, helping you learn from successes and failures to get ahead. Based on your quantitative and qualitative data, you can determine whether or not you consider your campaign successful. Remember that “success” is not black-and-white; it’s up to you and your team to answer.
By anchoring your strategy in clearly defined KPIs from the start, staying observant throughout the process, and committing to honest post-campaign reflection, you transform every effort, successful or not, into a learning opportunity. As you begin your next marketing campaign, consider how you can use analytics and observational information to your advantage.