5 secrets to campaign success in 2016

I must admit to a bit of ‘eye-rolling’ when I read tips on ‘how to create successful campaigns’. Oh I know I share a lot of them, written by other people, because they have merit. And yes, they are often written to lead you to believe that if you don’t do this, or that, your campaigns won’t be successful, and that is usually true too.

My exasperation with ‘successful campaign tips’ comes from knowing that you already possess the ‘magic bullet’ you are looking for to improve your campaign response. As you’ll see below, if you keep reading, they aren’t really secrets at all; you know all this already. You’ve likely read it all before in other ‘successful campaign tips’ posts, or maybe even wrote them yourself.

I’ve chosen to share these specific five ‘secrets’ because they are what I continually see contributing to low campaign performance. These aren't the only culprits, but I believe they cause the most damage. I truly believe that by sharing them, and if marketers implement them, we’ll see higher campaign performance in 2016.

• Media channel selection. If you are not sure which channels you should be using (online and offline), that will reach more profitable customers, the secret is to simply ask your current best customers which channels they use/consume. While data and algorithms are useful, and fun too, you could just ask your best customers which channels they consume and then launch your campaigns in them. [Extra tip – choosing the media channels that you consume, when you aren’t the target audience, isn’t an alternative that will help your campaign succeed. I’ve seen brands die doing this].
• Campaign Development (agency). If you’ve hired an agency to create your campaign and they come up with effective ideas, the secret to the campaign being a success is that you don’t try and change it. Trust your agency, you hired them for their expertise; listen to it. You will only reduce the effectiveness of your campaign by changing it, including, but not limited to, ‘making the logo bigger’.
• Campaign Expectations (in-house). If your campaign development is done in-house make sure that your team is skilled in what they are doing. Moving someone from operations into marketing to ‘give him or her a different challenge’ isn’t necessarily going to help your campaigns succeed (Yes, this happens far too frequently). The secret here is to at least be honest about your expectations of campaign success based on the skills of the team creating your campaigns.
• Right message for the audience and media channels selected. If your messaging and imagery isn’t right for the media channel and target you have selected, don’t expect a response. The secret here is this; launching a campaign through any direct channel (online/offline) without a specific call to action, offer/reason to respond, and appropriate imagery won’t get you the responses you plan. (Yes, this happens, all to often; while auditing a poor performing campaign I asked the brand for the rationale behind the imagery chosen, which wasn’t relevant to the message, target or offer, and was told that the graphic designer was bored and they wanted to let him ‘mix it up a bit’.) [Extra tip – both online and offline campaigns are glanced at to determine relevancy in under, usually, 10 seconds. Don’t look at your campaign for hours on end with a white background– give it a very quick glance – surrounded by the media environment it is going into. Especially for digital adverts – view it in the context of the other adverts ‘singing and dancing’ beside it within the same page view]
• Response Expectations. If you blanket your campaign within any media channel (online and offline), knowing that only a certain percentage of the audience is a likely prospect, don’t expect everyone to respond. And don't include everyone in your response calculation either, because it's misleading. Often the ROI of a campaign is calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of people that responded or bought. There are two issues I have with this – first, LTV, but I won’t go into that in this post, second, which I will go into, is that unless you are advertising to a very specific and unique segment of people, it is likely that a certain percentage of the people you are targeting aren’t going to become a customer. Yet you still include them in the ROI calculation – why? The secret here is to ask, if you don’t already know, for a breakdown of the demographics of the audience the media is targeting. Then be honest with calculating your response rate. If only 20%, 30%, 55% or 70% of the audience matches your best customer profile then calculate the response rate using the number, or percentage, of people who might actually buy through that media, against the total responses, not the total population that includes those that aren’t going to, nor would they ever, buy.

Now I know most of you, if you’ve read this far, will agree that you know all of this already. Likely some of you will still have hoped though that there was a new 'magic bullet' that I'd share at the end. For those looking for that 'magic bullet', this is it; what you already know is the secret to campaign success in 2016, you just need to implement it.