The marketing campaign is an effective method to reach to the target audience and gauging whether a campaign has been successful or not. It is one of the key elements of marketing both for in-house and within agencies.
A successful campaign shows you are doing everything good whereas unsuccessful shows that an improvement is required in your strategy.
But what defines a successful or unsuccessful campaign?
In order to answer that question, you first have to revisit the very start of your planning process and ask what was the aim of the campaign?
The Aim
Before deciding anything, you have to set the aim of your campaign i.e. what you want to achieve by running a campaign? There can be any aim like:
- Brand Awareness
- Brand Perception
- Lead Generation
- Audience Education
In order to measure whether these aims have been hit, each one will have goals and targets associated with it.
Goals, Targets, and KPI’s
Marketing campaigns should always have a goal associated with them, as these will help you to measure the performance of your campaign. The goal can include:
- Number of leads generated
- Social media audience engagement
- Number of social media followers increase (audience growth)
- Number of clicks on the campaign
From these goals, people set targets that are measurable and achievable within a specific period of time. For example:
“We want to generate 30 leads over the three months (10 per month) period of the campaign”. Or “We will increase our engagement rate across our social media channels from 3.5% to 5% over the next six months”. Or “We target to increase our relevant followers”.
From these targets, you can then set KPIs. Set KPIs on a monthly or quarterly basis, it works as an indicator of how your campaign is performing.
A different campaign would have different aim so there will be different KPIs also and so there will be different metrics which will need to be analyzed.
In case you are running an identical campaign, you can compare the data and result year-on-year. This will give you a clear indication as to whether a campaign has been more successful this time around, and if not then where did you lack.
The success of a marketing campaign is often determined by how much the return on investment (ROI) has generated.
Return on Investment
Has the activity or campaign that you have undertaken generated revenue and meet your campaign cost. Every campaign aim relates to increasing ROI and brand awareness.
The purpose of spending on marketing is to help the business grow, build brand image and become more successful. Whether you perform all the marketing activity itself or hire an agency to do for you, your ultimate goal is to get the financial result.
Overall, there are a number of metrics that marketing managers can look to analyze the success of a marketing campaign. Like web traffic to retweets to conversion but ultimately they will all lead to ROI, and we truly believe that return on investment is the best way of gauging whether a marketing campaign has been successful.
