How To Create A More Measurable Marketing Campaign

Whether you’re the type of person who reads everything and anything marketing related or you have every form of ad-blocking technology known to man installed on your devices, marketing is one thing no entrepreneur can live without.

Regardless of how you feel about advertising, you’ve doubtless seen marketing campaigns that impress you with their wit, targeting or some other element. On the other hand, you’ve undoubtedly seen many campaigns that leave you wondering, “What were they thinking?”

When it comes time for your own marketing campaigns, the ability to understand whether or not they are delivering meaningful results is crucial. Quality marketing can deliver big-time ROI, while lousy marketing is just another way of wasting money. By measuring your campaigns, you can determine if they are doing what you need.

What’s A Marketing Campaign?

Marketing campaigns are organised, strategised efforts to promote a particular company goal, such as raising awareness of a new product or gaining customer feedback. They usually aim to reach consumers in a number of different ways and involve a combination of media. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Email,
• Television or radio advertising,
• Pay-per-click, as well as
• Social media.

Marketing campaigns don’t encompass all marketing efforts for a brand. In fact, the word “campaign” is characterised as “a connected series of operations that are designed to bring about a specific result”. This is why politicians campaign for a specific election and militaries campaign for a particular battle.

Great marketing campaigns follow a consistent theme as well as promoting a single or focused idea or goal. For example, every Nike advertisement which you see or hear on the way to work probably isn’t part of a campaign. However, if you see a Nike billboard, scroll past a Nike-sponsored Instagram post, and receive a Nike email all promoting the same product this is definitely a marketing campaign.

Set Marketing Goals

Without clear marketing goals, you’re basically moving forward directionless – as well as working to get to vanity metrics that don’t necessarily help you achieve your overall business objectives. For instance, without social media objectives, you’re basically working to get more likes as well as engagement – but does that necessarily translate into success?

On the other hand, if your marketing goal is to convert more followers – perhaps one of the most popular goals – then don’t concentrate on creating content that only gets you likes as well as comments. Rather, try to drive more social media traffic to your website as well as encouraging your followers down the marketing funnel. You aren’t able to do much measuring done if you don’t know what metric you want to measure in the first place. And while you very well may might be sick of hearing about SMART goals by now, they’re still very relevant here as well.

Just as with any other goal for your business, quality goals for your marketing campaign are required to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant in addition to time bound. Goals which fit these criteria give you clear performance benchmarks for your marketing campaigns — such as increasing your number of leads by 10% by the end of the campaign.

While increasing sales or leads are clear goals for a campaign, they aren’t the be-all end-all of marketing. Some campaigns focus entirely on increasing web traffic, while others focus on improving the conversion rate. The correct goals line up with what will benefit your business the most. This shouldn’t just guide what you want to achieve with your marketing campaigns — it should influence the content of the ads, as well. Thoughtful goal setting will significantly improve the success of your marketing.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you would like to learn more about marketing then you need to do our Marketing Fundamentals Course. Follow this link to find out more.