Are your campaigns achieving the best results possible?

The best way to achieve the results you want is to continuously measure the performance and outputs of your campaign, as well as learn from previous campaigns.

You’ll reach larger audiences and ensure that you are making the most of your budgets.

It’s really important for campaigns to be based around a well-defined process here, where results can be measured across many of the key metrics and buyer indicators to ensure maximum impact when investing in marketing campaigns.

Here’s how to evaluate and refine your campaigns to optimise success…

Honing your audience

So, you want to launch a successful campaign. Do you know your audience?

Without targeting the right audience, your campaign can fail disastrously – wasting budget and time by showing your products or service to the wrong people.

Testing your audience doesn’t just mean targeting the right people. It means understanding what sort of content they like, and what will be the most engaging campaign format. Do they prefer high-level webinars or quick, snappy infographics? Do they willingly engage with content, or do they need to be warmed up with free high-value content first? Methods such as A/B testing can help you start to answer these questions.

Finding the right audience and understanding how best to reach them can be a long journey – but it’s worth it. It leads to more effective targeting, better engagement, and higher conversion rates, something that’s especially important if you’re on a tight budget.

Interested in learning how to perfectly hone your target audience? Read our full guide here.

Know your objectives

When it comes to evaluating your campaigns, conversions and return on investment (ROI) aren’t the only metrics you may want to consider. Depending on the strategic objective of any campaign, other measurables may be more important in given campaigns – such as impressions when measuring social reach.

Understanding your SMART goals plays a huge role in choosing KPIs and interpreting success accurately.

The three most common objectives for campaigns are:

Brand awareness

How many people have seen your search or social media ad? How many of these followed through to the website? A campaign focused on furthering and encouraging brand awareness should primarily track impressions and engagement. Through these campaigns, marketing managers can more accurately refine the target audience for subsequent, sales-driven approaches.

Lead generation

A lead generation campaign centres around, you guessed it, generating leads.

In these campaigns, the core priority is reaching the right audience and then grabbing their attention.  Lead generation campaigns play an important role in funnelling people from the awareness stage into conversion stages of your sales cycle.

Tracking the success of lead generation campaigns is usually measured by the data you get. The more successful a lead-gen campaign, the more high-quality data you’ll capture from viable leads.

Nurturing personas

You have your audience, and now you know they’re interested, but how do you approach them?

Jumping in with the hard sell with the initial contact is risky and can scare off your target customer base. This is why a nurture campaign is so valuable – keeping your audience informed and invested in your brand until they’re ready to convert, or after they’ve converted to make sure they stick around.

Engagement is the one to track here, helping you understand how interested and invested your current audience is.

Understanding the metrics

The world of marketing is full of jargon and technical language, often making it dizzying for those trying to plan and understand how to get the best results possible, and which metrics should be being used. For many organisations, the only metric that matters is closed sales or ROI. But while ROI is important, it often isn’t the only factor to look at when measuring the impact or success of your campaigns.

One reason for this is that it might take several campaigns to get one valuable lead sales-ready. The average buyer needs to engage in at least six touchpoints, so incorporating campaigns that focus on nurturing leads to keep your audience engaged is critical, while they won’t necessarily lead to an immediate return.

Besides ROI, some other metrics that are useful when measuring the success of your campaigns include:

Impressions: Used to measure how many times your piece of content was viewed.

Website traffic: What the overall monthly volume of visitors reaching a website is.

Click through rate: CTR divides the number of clicks on your ad by impressions. If your ad is seen 100 times but clicked on 15, your CTR would be 15%.

Increased social following: This is the total percentage increase in your total followers for each social channel, usually measured at least monthly.

Conversions: This is the number of times your audience performs a designated action. What constitutes a conversion can change depending on your campaign’s objective, but can involve email sign-ups, click-throughs, scheduling a consultation, or landing on a certain page.

Ready to get started?

With optimised, valuable campaigns in place, organisations can see not only an increase in conversions and sales, but also reputation, engagement, and social following. To learn more about the possibilities of innovative campaigns, and what expanded reach can do for your business, get in touch with us here for a free consultation.