Marketing campaigns demand loads of time and effort throughout their cycle. From the planning stage to the execution stage, there’s a lot of active work that you’ll need to put in.
In this post, we’ll share the basics of a marketing campaign and how you can build a successful one. We’ll also share some effective ways to track the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Let’s get started!
A marketing campaign is a set of strategic marketing activities that collectively contribute to a singular business goal. This goal could be around introducing a new product, service, or updated feature, or boosting a specific customer engagement metric.
For example, if a shoe-manufacturing business introduces a new design for the summer season, they could create a marketing campaign around this new product’s launch. They can use as many platforms (social, print, etc.) to achieve this goal. Similarly, a business can run several campaigns at a time.
The fundamental components of a marketing campaign are as follows:
- Identification of target market
- Planning the goal and outlining the campaign
- Delivery of marketing campaign
- Measurement of campaign
- Results
Each component is a research-intensive process. The second and fourth components demand the highest amount of research and input.
How to build an effective marketing campaign
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for developing a marketing campaign. It varies from business to business and from goal to goal. However, there are a few universal steps and customer engagement models that you can take to approach the development process strategically.
First, identify your target market. Usually, you only need to brainstorm with your team over this. You won’t need a tool or any other resource for this step. Just think about your goal and assess who you wish to interact with. Some examples of the target market are as follows:
- Returning female customers, aged between 18-30
- New middle-aged prospects, located in the USA—running a digital business
Notice how each example of the target market is super specific in terms of age, gender, location, and occupation. The more specific you are, the better. It will help you tailor your marketing campaign around the target audience more effectively.
Once you’ve identified your target market, it’s time to pick a customer engagement model. A customer engagement model is basically a marketing framework that can naturally drive your prospect from one point to another in the buying continuum—it brings them closer and closer to purchase.
There are over 13 different types of customer engagement models. There are different models for each stage of the customer journey. We recommend reading this detailed post on customer engagement models and picking the most relevant model for your marketing campaign.
It will help you build a marketing campaign by directing:
- What data to collect?
- Where to interact with your customers?
- How to interact with your prospects?
How to monitor your marketing campaign
Similar to building a marketing campaign, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for monitoring the campaign either. There are different metrics for different stages of the customer journey. Below, we’ve listed some of the most important metrics to measure along with some super handy tools.
Metrics to measure:
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Conversion metrics
Conversion metrics are the most essential customer engagement metrics to track in any marketing campaign. These include conversion rate, clickthrough rate, and conversion. All three of these metrics basically represent the number of visitors that successfully converted into customers and quality leads.
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Return on ad spend metrics
These metrics represent how profitable your ad spent was. For example, it could tell you how many leads did you get for each $100 you spent on paid advertising. Some specific metrics under this category of metrics include cost per lead (CPL), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
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Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics are mostly platform relevant. If you’re running your marketing campaign on social media, then you should be tracking the reactions, comments, reshares, impressions, and DMs. However, if you’re running a marketing campaign on your website, you should be interested more in CTA-driven actions, average time on page, scroll depth, clicks, etc.
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Email marketing metrics
Email marketing campaigns are often the most effective marketing campaigns. The key metrics that you should be tracking for these campaigns are open rates, clickthrough rates, subscribers, and unsubscribes.
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SEO marketing metrics
SEO marketing metrics usually involve website-relevant metrics. These include web page views, bounce rate, session duration, and landing page performance. Keyword performance is also SEO-relevant. So you might want to track keyword positioning, page ranking, search volume, keyword position change, and top queries by click.
Tools you will need
Now, there are specialized and dedicated tools for tracking each type of metric mentioned above. Some leading tools to track key marketing metrics are as follows:
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a lead generation tool that allows you to build pop-ups and track campaign analytics. We recommend using this tool to track conversion metrics like clicks and conversions. It also allows you to track user journey and movement across your website, so you can understand patterns and come up with a better solution.
MySignature
MySignature is one of the best email tracking tools out there. It integrates with your Gmail and allows you to track read receipts, open rates, and clicks for each email that you sent. There’s no free plan for this email marketing tool. But the basic plan starts at only $6 per month. So, it is an excellent choice for small businesses, solopreneurs, and content creators. For bigger businesses, we recommend Right Inbox and Leadboxer.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is the best free tool to track marketing metrics and analytics. It works best to track marketing campaigns relevant to your web pages. You can track traffic, average CTR, highest ranking pages, lowest ranking pages, position over time, and impressions over time. You’ll need decent marketing knowledge and experience to use this tool effectively, but it’ll save huge bucks compared to other marketing tools.
Google Analytics with Salesforce (a merge)
Google Analytics is another free marketing analytical tool by Google. It allows you to track each page’s performance and the overall traffic you’re getting. You can get as specific as measuring the bounce rate and as vague as tracking the overall traffic on the website.
On the contrary, Salesforce is a customer-relationship management tool that tracks the leads closed by your sales representatives. Whether these leads are closed on the website or off-website.
For businesses that close deals “offline” and generate leads from multiple channels, the integration of Google Analytics with Salesforce can be quite a handy one. With GA Connector, you’ll be able to build even more powerful Google Analytics reports with offline data. You can get all your data in one place and track the metrics that you need to. This tool works best for conversions.
Final thoughts
By now, we hope you’re well aware of the basics of a marketing campaign and how to approach the development process. We hope you’ve also got a lead on how to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
