How to Optimize your Marketing Campaigns?

Brands design marketing campaigns to promote a specific endeavour, create awareness of the organization, or simply attract new customers. Campaign assessment surveys offer brands a 360-degree view of how marketing efforts affect brand value by analyzing metrics such as brand awareness, perception, purchase intent, and more. Monitoring and tracking your campaign’s success assist brands in making smarter decisions in real-time and plan better for the next one. 

Different Types of Marketing Campaigns

• Traditional Media Campaign

When a brand relies on traditional media outlets to enhance brand awareness or promote a service/product, then the campaign is known as a traditional media campaign. Common mediums used for conventional media campaigns include TV, print, radio, direct-mail advertising, or simply putting up ads in the newspaper. 

• Seasonal Push Campaign

A seasonal push campaign is frequently used by companies that experience an influx of businesses during a specific season. A local retail store may create ads on social media or put out pamphlets of the sale to inform customers and increase revenue. 

• Product Launch Campaign 

A product launch campaign is executed by the manufacturer with the support of distribution partners to spread awareness about the product. For example, a shoe company launching new women sneakers need to focus its product launch campaign for a particular age group using social media advertising or sending emails to existing customers.

• Brand Awareness Campaign 

A brand awareness campaign aims to focus on or build awareness towards building a brand by defining the value of the products or associating the brand with a cause/message. The campaign ensures that the target audience repeats their purchases and becomes aware of the brand.

• Rebranding Campaign 

A rebranding campaign is used by companies that have fallen out of favor with their target audiences and wish to make a comeback to regain the customers’ trust. Besides, the organization can also use a rebranding campaign to advertise new options for encouraging recent sales.

• Brand Launch Campaign 

A brand launch campaign aims to put the organization’s story and message to the audience, amplify brand awareness, and improve brand equity. The campaign is aimed to control the brand’s narrative and public image to differentiate a brand from its competitor.

Key Steps for Optimizing Your Marketing Campaign

• Review your marketing strategy

Apply the RACE (Reach, Act, Converse, Engage) framework to plan, manage, and optimize campaigns and use the data and customer insights to track and improve consumers’ journeys. Identify challenges and opportunities and comply with data-driven strategies to win more customers. 

• Review your campaign’s objectives & KPIs

Make it a priority to set the proper context and tone for the post-campaign analysis before connecting the dots. At the early stage, design a brief overview of KPIs and campaign objectives to make better sense of the data. 

• Break down campaign results by channel 

Marketers can go into more detail about how each element of the campaign performed, to learn about all the different digital activities. The report section should focus on critical channels, objectives, KPIs, and metrics such as view thru rate, positive earned media, brand buzz, frequency, etc. 

• Provide campaign analysis take-outs 

Cover main themes and take-outs from the report and identify the main plan of action. Analyze step-change learnings alongside continuous improvement learnings. Highlight successes and failures of the campaigns that may require testing and further refinements.

Key Metrics to Measure Campaign Performance

• Average Click-through Rate (CTR) 

Click-through rate (CTR) is an advertisement metric that provides information about the number of impressions that clicked on the displayed ad. The average CTR for an ad campaign offers insights into the effectiveness of a campaign’s design, ad copy, and reach. CTR is an essential metric for every kind of business to know what works and what not in the age of digitalization. Higher CTR indicates that your link is drawing more attention and traffic to your site, and average CTR is a good performance indicator. On the other hand, a low CTR means the copy or headline is ineffective, or you are targeting the wrong demographic.

• Conversion Rates

A conversion rate determines the percentage of users that have completed a desired action. For instance, if an advertiser posts a makeup brand ad on a social media platform like Instagram targeting around 10,000 people, out of which 500 people click on the ad, then the conversion rate can be calculated as 

500/10000= 0.05, or a 5% conversion rate

Conversion rate analysis reveals which channels are most effective for promoting a product, that helps determine the effectiveness of a campaign and guide strategic decision-making. A high conversion rate leads to a better return on investment as the cost of acquiring a customer is low. Whereas high bounce rates lead to lower conversion rates, thus negatively impacting ROI.

• Cost per Mille (CPM)

Cost per “mille” or cost per thousand refers to an average price for getting one thousand ad impressions. Every website, advertising platform, and affiliate partner has different rates, pricing structures, or bidding options for calculating CPM. While calculating CPM is a difficult task, the metric provides excellent insights for campaign diagnosis. Extremely high CPM means your geographic targeting is too tight, or the ad network is struggling to find enough inventory. CPM abnormalities indicate trouble with the content placements where you run ads. CPM is an effective metric for estimating revenue on ads, calculating daily active user count, or counting the average number of ad impressions for game and app developers. 

You can also use the CPM metrics to gauge interest without breaking your advertising budget. For instance, if an ad targeting the age group of 18-35 years is getting more engagement on an entertainment website, you need to adjust your marketing according to the younger audience to create interest in your product. CPM can help to achieve that.

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are prospects that have expressed some interest in what a brand has to offer and provide personal details, which can be used to convert them into leads. These leads are a good fit and more likely to become a customer. Each type of customer interaction with the website content is assigned a lead score to help sales and marketing personnel determine where the visitor stands in the buying cycle. Marketers utilize lead scoring points to model a buyer’s journey. 

• Social Media Metrics

Every social media offers native analytics that you can dive in to take relevant information. If you have a low budget, native analytics resources can be a good starting point to analyze customer engagement. You can capture the engagement rate through interactions such as likes, comments, number of shares, downloads, reshares, mentions, and reposts. A high engagement rate indicates how responsive your audience is and how many organic followers you have. 

• Brand Survey 

Brand tracking measures change brand perception over time through branded surveys or focus groups to quantify a return on brand investment. The three most popular brand tracking methods are brand awareness, brand association, and brand consideration. Brand awareness can be determined with two types of measurements, unaided awareness and aided awareness. Unaided awareness helps recognize how well consumers remember a brand without any prompting or visuals, while aided awareness recognizes if consumer remembers your brand with prompting. 

Brand association requires asking consumers about the brand to analyze how the brands are able to communicate the brand’s message. Brand consideration includes asking for customer’s feedback to picture a level of brand loyalty.

• Budget Returns

While some campaigns will be targeted at the lead-in to a sales cycle, some are just about driving awareness in your target customer’s mind. Awareness metrics are hard to measure as they do not provide tangible fiscal ROI, but they can provide a return on your investment in the long run. Asking the consumers how they found you can help identify metrics that do not work, which can help save up money used for additional resources.