If you’ve ever liked a marketing campaign and thought “I wonder what goes into all that,” this blog’s for you.
Whether it’s the Barbie campaign that took over the summer, the introduction of a new Mailchimp offering, or even a fall drink at Starbucks now that pumpkin spice is back, marketing campaigns like these are successful for a reason. It's because the campaign managers are asking — and answering — the right questions to ensure that they're launching a campaign that'll offer them actionable insight down the road.
Because this wouldn’t be a marketing blog without a mock client to work from, let’s pretend we’re trying to create a campaign for a B2B SaaS platform made for the Marketing and Technology Industry.
Setting Your Goals
One of the first things we do when we’re working through the beginning stages of a campaign is ask, “What does success look like?” This helps us get on the same page with our client to know what the main goal of our campaign is and helps fill in the details like channels and tactics.
Success could be driving more sales for this new product compared to our last launch, increasing demo request form submissions, or generating awareness with our target audience that this new product exists. Whatever it may be, it’s directly linked to the key performance indicators (KPIs) we set for our campaign!
Choosing Your KPIs
After you’ve chosen your #GOALS, you must determine how you’re going to track those goals! Here are 4 common questions you might want to ask yourself to help determine the KPIs that are right for your campaign objective.
- Do you want to drive sales of your product or service?
- KPIs: conversions, transactions, average order value, conversion rate, clicks, and website sessions
- Is your product or service new and lacks brand awareness?
- KPIs: impressions, reach, email opens, and video views
- Do you want to educate your audience with content like a downloadable?
- KPIs: CTR, form submissions, cost per form submissions, PDF downloads, website sessions, avg. time on page, pages per session, conversion rate
- Would it benefit your audience if they could demo your service?
- KPIs: CTR, form submissions, cost per form submissions
Identifying KPIs is crucial to measuring the success of your campaign, which is why at Liquid we establish these up front, track these weekly, and report on performance monthly to see how performance changes over time. This way we can note any trends and make actionable decisions based on data.
In this example, our mock client is ultimately looking to drive conversions, but would also benefit from some more awareness tactics along the way to build more brand recognition.
Consider Your Audience
Now that you’ve picked an objective, does audience targeting support it? Ask yourself these questions!
- Do you know who your audience is?
- Maybe it’s Women ages 18-45 living in Eastern Pennsylvania or it’s Men and Women ages 30-60 working in accounting and payroll.
- Do you know where your audience is?
- Would they typically be on channels like Facebook or Instagram? Maybe they lean younger and are heavily active on TikTok! Do they live on LinkedIn?
- Do you know what your audience does and who they work for?
- Are they working in a specific industry? Do they typically work in a senior level role? Do they work at a specific company? Do they have any industry-specific certifications or skills?
- Do you know how your audience uses certain channels?
- Are they using LinkedIn as a networking tool? Do they search TikTok to learn about different topics? Do they follow specific thought leaders or media outlets?
We know that the audience for our mock client is business professionals ages 27-55 across the United States working in tech or marketing at a company. For those reasons, we’ll be focusing on generating form submissions for product demos and on-channel awareness within our target audience like impressions, CTR, and website sessions.
Choose Your Channels
Now that we’ve considered our KPIs and audience, let’s talk channels! At this point in our strategy, we’re considering a lot of factors when it comes to choosing the channels that are right for a campaign. Typically, this includes researching where our audience lives online and then from there we build our audience to see if that checks out.
Here are a few questions we ask ourselves that might point you in the right direction!
- Is your audience largely business focused, like a B2B product?
- Channels: LinkedIn, email, paid search
- Is your audience comprised of shoppers?
- Channels: Facebook, Instagram, paid search, and email
- Does your audience lean younger?
- Channels: Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok
- Is your audience in the awareness stage of your marketing funnel?
- Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Hulu and Spotify
Knowing a budget range is also helpful when determining a channel mix, as it helps us know how many channels and audiences we should focus on. Plus, some channels like LinkedIn are very expensive compared to other social channels, which will need to be considered upfront.
In this case, our company is looking to use a combination of LinkedIn, Facebook, paid search, and email so that we can reach our audience, generate awareness and consideration through educational ads, and drive leads.
Craft Your Message
Once you know your goals, KPIs, target audience, and channels, you can consider messaging! Ask yourself these questions when determining the right message for your campaign.
- What pain points do they have?
- Does your product solve a common problem better than competitors? Would your product or service help them save time or money? Does your product help increase efficiency and accuracy for their job?
- What motivates them?
- Are they trying to get the best deal and save money? Is the service you provide something that requires elevated customer experience?
- What kind of value does your product bring?
- Do you have more benefits than a competitor? Is it easy to use? Is your product better priced? Is it integrated with another product they already use?
- Is there language commonly associated with your product/business?
- Does your industry include acronyms that are easily understood among your target audience? What buzz words are associated with your product?
Gaining Actionable Insights From Results
How do you analyze the results of your campaign?
Let’s walk through our example.
At our mock company, we’ve got a growing email list, downloadable content, product demos, and an organic presence on Facebook and LinkedIn.
From here, we’re able to analyze data around how the campaign is performing by looking at different KPIs associated with these integrated tactics. Let’s say we saw the following from our company’s campaign:
- We launched LinkedIn ads targeting managers at tech and marketing companies and saw that users in a brand manager role had the highest CTR
- We saw that IT companies had a higher share of impressions compared to others we’re targeting
- We saw a few comments on our Facebook ads related to demoing our product with someone on our sales team
- We saw that users clicked on our email CTA about product features more than our case study CTA
From these 4 observations, we can make the following changes to our campaign!
- Revisit targeting to include other job titles similar to “brand manager”, since we know this part of our audience shows more interest
- Consider breaking out the IT industry into its own campaign, tailoring the targeting and messaging specifically for this industry
- Launch an ad with the goal to generate demo sign-ups for our service, post about what our audience will learn from the demo organically on our channels, and make sure it’s easy to sign up on our website
- Create email, social, and blog content around product features as we can see that our audience is interested in learning more
This has allowed us to identify not only successes, but areas of improvement for our campaign.
Rinse and Repeat
Campaigns are like a fine wine; they get better with age! The more you’re able to continue iterating on your campaign successes, the better your insights and performance will get.
However, this is just an intro to the research and planning that goes into the successful integrated campaigns we’ve helped clients launch. We can help you figure out the next steps. Hit our line and get in touch with our team of Integrated Marketing Strategists!