3 Key Questions to Save Your Next Campaign

As marketers, we all hope to get our campaigns “right” straight out of the gate. We devote diligent effort and significant time crafting the strategy, message, creative elements, media, customer journeys, and CTAs, … and then we release our masterpieces into the world. Of course, the work doesn’t stop there. Once in market, it’s our role to monitor the outcomes in each channel and continuously optimize performance to ensure the strategy delivers on business objectives. We all love a steep upward curve of campaign performance, but not every campaign goes according to plan.?

?Let’s say your new campaign launches across all your standard paid channels: LinkedIn, Google, display ads, etc. But something isn’t looking right. You just aren’t seeing the cumulative ROI you were hoping for. Questions racing through your mind following a sub-optimal launch may include the following:??

• Are we spending enough to reach each audience???

• What’s causing one channel to have a great engagement or click-through rate but not the others??

• Where’s the disconnect between the click-through rate and conversion rate??

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As detail-oriented people very close to our own work, it can be tempting to try to diagnose and solve the issue with granular thinking. But while spend, audience targeting, and creative elements are important, they’re all simply levers you can pull to ensure your campaign hits your KPIs and delivers on your objectives. Understanding the broader issue needs a higher-level perspective.?

?If your campaign isn’t performing as expected, evaluating the following three questions can save you a lot of trial, error, and frustration:?

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Question 1: Is my marketing strategy misaligned??

The first step to a successful campaign is defining your audience. Who are they? Why do they care? What do we want them to feel or know? These questions are important for your creative team to understand as they develop the messaging around the value propositions, but it’s also crucial for your channel managers to understand.??

?Cross-disciplinary collaboration should start early on and continue throughout the process. Some audiences and messages are more important to building brand awareness, while others are calls to action, e.g., X client did it, and you can too! Different messages require different targeting, so pulling channel managers in early allows them to plan ahead and research how best to target the audience for that message within their respective channels. They should also be contributing to the conversation with observations about past campaign performance. Ensuring the whole team (channel managers, strategists, and creatives) is communicating throughout the development and refinement phases of your campaign can ensure the messaging works for each channel and there are no surprises when you go to launch. Lastly, define your KPIs and goals. You’ve already set your business objectives; now, ensure you take a moment to define how this campaign is aligned with those objectives and moves you closer to your overarching goals. Fostering a truly collaborative work environment is key: once all teams understand and agree on these goals, then everyone can work towards the same vision. This alignment further minimizes the risk of siloed efforts, helping to ensure that each team is contributing to the outlined objectives.??

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Question 2: Do I have discordant customer journeys??

You put beautiful creative material out into the market, the messages are being delivered to the right people, your click-through and engagement rates are well above benchmarks, but you only got one lead … what happened? Did you think about the full buyer journey, from awareness (do they know who you are?) to consideration (do they understand your benefits?) and what happens after they click? Your creative driver and the corresponding landing page should be similar enough* to avoid any confusion when your customer clicks through from one to the other. The saying, “you have seven seconds to make a first impression,” holds true for a first date as well as a digital advertising experience. Most of us don’t have much patience in our digital experiences—after clicking on an ad, we want to know right away that we’ve arrived at the right place. Offering an eBook download? You better have that eBook offer at the top of the page. If you’re making people dig for the information you’ve promised them, chances are they’re going to leave and find it elsewhere from someone who doesn’t make them wait.?

?*Note: Some channels, like Google ads, perform best when the keywords, ad, and landing page match. This tactic requires extra work to duplicate pages with slight modifications to the messaging to match your keywords and ads, but in the long run, your delivery rate, quality score from Google, and click-through and conversion rates will indicate the juice was worth the squeeze.?

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Question 3: Do I have old campaigns still in market that are clashing with my new one??

You’ve worked hard to ensure that every asset for each channel has the right creative elements, messaging, and buyer journey. Your channel managers have set up their targeting and spend. All is going according to plan …, but have you considered how the new campaign fits in with everything else you’re running? If that market is exposed to outdated messaging that doesn’t align with your updated strategy or creative material, all your hard work could be negated. To avoid giving mixed messages to your prospects, audit each channel and pause any ads that might conflict with your new campaign. Use this as an opportunity to revisit low-performing creative material, double-check your audience targeting, or even spin up some A/B tests, whether that’s creative, audience, or something else. Taking this extra step gives your new campaign the best opportunity for success and demonstrates your attention to detail.??

?As you may have gathered, there are two themes here: cross-disciplinary collaboration and planning ahead. If your teams are talking and have time to plan for the intricacies of a cross-channel campaign, you can ensure from the start that the message for each audience on each channel hits home the first time. And even if it doesn’t, your teams are so bought in to the goals of the campaign that a tweak here or there won’t cause everyone to feel flustered. Not every campaign can be perfect, but starting with some reflection, collaboration, and planning, you can put your best efforts into it and feel confident at launch.?

Learn more about how we can help you build your next successful campaign: https://www.ulcomm.com/contact