Ditching Output-Obsession for Marketing Campaigns: A Major W
Written by the Obala Team - (5 Minute Read)
Marketing teams often keep their heads down focusing on outputs such as sending out emails, launching landing pages for service features, publishing ebooks and guides, hosting events or webinars launching social posts or paid adverts etc. It is common for businesses to often consider the performance of each marketing output in isolation as the overall campaign performance.
However, focusing on individual outputs alone restricts a marketing team’s ability to uncover performance data and insights that could help reflect the positive contributions marketing teams make to a business, or pinpoint critical learnings that can be applied to operations.
So it’s critical that marketing teams combine relevant outputs into planned marketing campaigns.
What is a Marketing Campaign
Marketing campaigns are the mixture of actions, mediums and media a company uses to connect with people to promote a brand, product or service on a variety of channels.
That being said, a marketing campaign isn’t just the sum of the outputs that occur as part of it.
Start with Strategic Purpose
An essential first component of any marketing campaign is the plan. Planning first and foremost helps ensure that a marketing campaign always connects and contributes to overall business objectives.
Marketing campaigns work best when they are formed around a key strategic goal. The planning phase is key in aligning all teams and stakeholders on what all activities and outputs under the campaign will look to achieve.
The goal of a marketing campaign could be all from:
Increasing brand awareness
Growing your marketing database and audience
Promoting or Launching a new Product
Adding potential customers to your sales pipeline
Retaining your customer base
With the different activities that contribute to a campaign, the temptation could be to set out a campaign to achieve multiple goals at once. I mean yeah you can, but doing that often leads to confused messaging and performance where a campaign can lose its focus. Keep to a single campaign goal to ensure the purpose of actions are not lost.
Audience, Channel & Message Clarity
With the purpose of the campaign nailed down, you can get specific over the target audience of your campaign.
We’d all love to hit everyone and have all people engage with campaign outputs but the reality is that everything ain’t for everybody. The more specific and targeted your activities - the better the results will be.
Selecting a key audience based on their characteristics such as age, location, gender, profession will help narrow down the pool to target with activities. This can be combined with criteria specific to your business which can be determined by reviewing your own data - so for example as a shoe business you may look into your past sales and choose to develop a campaign to reach people who have purchased vegan shoes previously.
This will go a long way to helping you understand the most effective marketing channels and outputs you need to reach these audiences and achieve your goal. This step will give an indication of activities that will waste time, money and resources - so for example you lose time investing in tik-tok ads to promote dentures for people over 90.
(Disclaimer — No shade intended for the over 90’s, we love everyone, it’s just no one’s nan is on tik-tok buying teeth…we’re open to being proved wrong.)
When looking back over your campaign, you can then focus your performance assessment on reviewing how many people that fit your audience engaged with your outputs.
Be S.M.A.R.T & Set Relevant KPIs & Targets
Honestly I know this is cliche but for real, S.M.A.R.T objectives are the truth. Making sure that you literally sit and write out objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely will put you in a place where you have a clear understanding of what can be achieved early on and which outputs will be needed to help. Here’s where you start to put numbers to each objective and get clarity on what the most relevant KPIs and metrics will be to assess the performance of any output.
This documentation of intentions, needs and targets can be shared business wide. So you questions such as “Why hasn’t this ebook series generated millions in direct sales within 2 weeks?” When its goal was to increase brand awareness and and its objective to acquire a hundred new contacts via your website over a month. No no, now honey, you will have receipts.
Simplify reports, tracking and analysis
This joined up structure of all campaign, plans, objectives, outputs, audiences and measures makes reporting and analysing performance data much simpler and clearer. Return on investment (ROI) becomes easier to understand across the entire campaign. Outputs are not judged by metrics solely related to their individual performance alone but as part of their contribution to overall campaign objectives.
For example, in a webinar campaign launched to acquire new contacts to a database - the performance of emails sent to promote the webinar aren’t judged on open rates and click rates, but in relation to how many webinar registrations they drove.
Costs of the campaign can be reviewed holistically with return on investment is calculated based on the amount of contacts generated, not sales revenue added in the pipeline, even though this may be a by-product of the campaign.
This enables marketers to have a clear understanding of where this type of campaign best contributes to the overall marketing funnel, and in some cases, uncover the fact that certain campaign activities may be better suited to different goals.
Finally, this helps guide future campaign strategy and supporting activities required to move people down the funnel. This instead of all outputs being reviewed against sales and revenue generated.
Summary
All in all campaigns are a WIN for marketing teams - no more head down working with no direction, understand if your outputs do what they’re supposed to or find out what activities don’t work for certain objectives and adapt.
Are you joining up your marketing activities and outputs into structured and planned campaigns?
Share your insights in the comments below.
