The number one tip we’ve found for any marketing strategy or campaign is starting from the bottom. While ads may look cool and the idea of getting more clicks is always nice, those are usually the last piece of the puzzle. Before getting into the fun part, you need to define an outline for your entire campaign strategy, and this starts with a well-defined goal.
Baseline
Before you start any campaign, you’ll want to establish a baseline measurement. This should be at least the same amount of time that you’re running your campaign for (e.g. if you’re running a two-week campaign, start with at least a two-week baseline). Pay close attention to whatever metric you want to use to measure the success of your campaign: if you want to sell more Thingies™, count how many Thingies™ you sell in the same amount of time before your campaign. Without a baseline, you’ll have no idea if your marketing efforts are actually paying off, and many times looking in-depth at your baseline can help you reduce costs on your actual campaign.
Define Goals
Meaningful goals mean a meaningful campaign. Clicks are a very concise way of measuring “success” but don’t actually measure anything useful. For your goals, you’ll want something that you can not only measure, but also hold onto and use in the future. For many industries marketing directly translates to sales, but not all campaigns are as straightforward. Maybe the goal of a campaign is to educate your audience? In that case, your goal would be to have a list of contacts that you can educate and communicate with in the future. Maybe the goal of your campaign is to get people to inquire about your services? Then your goal can be to get a number of qualified leads calling and emailing you.
Measure at Every Point
The most successful marketing campaign I know of is the impulse buy shelf at the grocery store: in less than thirty seconds, I go through the entire Marketing Funnel. But that’s not always the case with (especially digital) marketing campaigns. If you really have a worthwhile product or service, it can take days or months of consideration before your potential customers convert. But as a marketer, you have the opportunity to guide your customers through every step of the process, and then measure the results and refine your strategy. There are tools today that allow you to track and measure your customers’ journey, but it’s up to you to make sure you put them in the right places. Sending out an email? Add a CTA (such as a Learn More button) at the bottom to see who is actually interested in your offering, instead of who is opening the email just to delete it. If you sell stuff online, you can keep track of who has stuff in their cart and target them later.
Always Learn
Of course, there’s no such thing as a “perfect” marketing campaign: there’s always room to improve. But by paying close attention to your marketing efforts and measuring every step against a baseline, you’ll be able to define exactly what works and what doesn’t, helping you to improve your marketing with every campaign. Here at Refinery Lab, we understand what it takes to run a business, and it can be tough to be “in the weeds” of a marketing campaign while keeping it in a birdseye view. Through our digital marketing audits, we can help create solutions for you to measure and refine your marketing strategy. Get in contact with us, today!