What Are We Even Doing? Questions To Answer Before You Start A Marketing Campaign

While you might think that starting at the beginning of a marketing campaign would be best, it’s actually better to start at the end. Knowing what results you want to measure makes it easier to report on later, and gives you a clear sense of which metrics to monitor while the campaign is running. Avoid doing this and you’ll end up directionless and unclear about what you want to measure and have to sort through all the end results. It’s best to answer as many key questions about the campaign as possible before you ever hit that “publish” button. Questions like . . .

What Do We Want the Goal of the Campaign to Be?

Starting a project without knowing what you want the end result to be is like building a house without knowing what you want it to look like. Soon enough, you’ve got a parking garage with doors that go nowhere, outlets on the ceiling, and toilets hanging off the side of the walls. Set out the goals you want to achieve, but also make them attainable. For example, More brand awareness is a good goal, but you need to know what metrics you’re going to look at for the campaign to be considered a success (more on that later).

What Type of Campaign Should We Run?

This is a bit broad so let’s get more specific. There are many platforms, and even sub-campaigns you can run through a single channel, so one of the first things to decide is how you want people to view and engage with your campaign. Doing so means you won’t miss out on metrics you could’ve had on another platform. With that said, you need to keep in mind the context of the metrics and primary goal for the channels. A marketing campaign on LinkedIn to get more post engagement won’t give you the best results if your company is business-to-consumer since LinkedIn focused on business-to-business connections. As another example, Facebook has a lot of sub-campaign options depending on the goals you want to achieve like link clicks or post engagements, so choose the one that best suits your goals.

What Metrics Are the Most Important to Our Campaign?

Finally we get to metrics, the avocado on toast to every marketing campaign (bread and butter is so early 2000s). But you still need to hold off on pressing “post”. Knowing what metrics you actually care about before a campaign starts means you’ll save time trying to figure out which ones actually mattered at the end of the campaign. Here are two of the most common marketing campaigns, and the best metrics for them:

Brand Awareness

• Number of mentions: You might not realize it, but you can check how many times your brand is mentioned online through social mentioning tools. Paid services exist if you want a comprehensive breakdown, but you can also find many free tools like socialsearcher.com to at least get a rough benchmark.
• Reach: Often confused with ‘impressions’, reach is commonly defined as the unique number of people that have seen your content. We say ‘commonly’ because this definition tends to be slightly different between each platform, so make sure you check how it’s defined before going all-in on measuring.
• Engagement: While not directly tied to brand awareness, you can get a sense of how effective your brand awareness campaigns are through engagement metrics like shares, follows, and comments.

Lead Generation

• Clickthrough Rate (CTR): Defined as a percentage, CTR is the number of people who clicked on your ad divided by the number of impressions (how many views your ad received). This metric is often valuable to many different campaigns since it gives you a sense of the overall engagement people have with your advertising.
• Conversion Rate: Crucial to any campaign that involves conversions, this metric tells you how many people are completing your defined goals. Also another percentage, it’s defined as the number of completed conversions divided by the number of impressions.
• Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Defined pretty much how it sounds, this can be a great measurable to monitor for lead generation, especially since you’re able to see how much it costs to get people to just click on your ads.

There are tons of metrics when it comes to marketing, and while the metrics we’ve provided can give you a good start, there are plenty more that can also be helpful depending on your goals. If you need some help with a marketing campaign, we can help get you set up and ready to go. Plus, we can even track results for you so you can get a succinct picture of where your money went and the results you received.