Creating a successful marketing campaign is not done on a whim, but instead requires extensive research and planning.  To be successful you have to put in the time and effort into the creation of the campaign and not just reacting to what you learn once the campaign is live.  While it is vital to react to what the data from the campaign tells you, you’ll be able to save time and money if you put in the necessary work into the pre launch efforts.  The following steps should be taken during the campaign planning process in order to be able to properly track and meet the goals of the campaign.

Define Business Objectives

Before you can begin to create a marketing campaign you first need to understand the business and its objectives.  Understand the market that the company competes in and how the company stacks up to its competition.  It’s also important to have a full understanding of who the customers are and how marketing initiatives can help reach a broader spectrum of the target audience.

Specific business objectives then need to be agreed upon by the company stake-holders.    These need to be specific goals and not just to “increase sales” or “generate more leads.”

Define Conversion Events

Next you need to go through each of the business objectives and determine what event will constitute a conversion.  These should be micro conversion goals that when combined give a detailed picture of how the campaign is performing in relation to the defined business objectives.

Let’s say that your business objective is to increase sales of a new product by 20%.  A few micro conversion events could be:

• A visitor lands on the campaign page
• A visitor views the detailed product description page
• A visitor purchases the product

Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

These are the metrics that allow you to determine how the campaign is performing in relation to your micro conversion events and your overall business objectives.  There should be a performance metric for each of the conversion events that have been established.  Based on the conversion events above, a couple KPIs that could be established include:

• Response rate and cost per visitor to the campaign page
• Campaign page to detailed product description page rate
• Conversion rate and cost per conversion

Collect Data and Assess

Now that you know everything that needs to be tracked to determine the success or failure of the campaign, the next step is to make sure you have the proper tracking capabilities in place.  This is a crucial step since without appropriate tracking you’ll be in the dark and have no hard numbers to analyze how the campaign is performing.  Once you’ve begun to collect data you’ll be able to start to asses how each of the KPIs are performing in relation to the goals and objectives of the campaign.

Make Changes and Repeat

Now that you have the performance data you can begin to make improvements that will increase the performance of the micro conversion events which will in turn improve the overall business objectives.  These changes could include changes to your ads, the website copy, or the checkout process.

You then go back and collect data on how the changes have affected the performance metrics.   The cycle of improvement should then continue as you try and maximize the capabilities that the campaign can have on meeting or exceeding the original business objectives that were established.

Filed under: Analytics, Education and Training on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 by Nate Linnell |
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