What makes a marketing campaign successful

Summary

To make a successful marketing campaign, you should meet some requirements. Some of these may seem obvious, but if we look at more detailed aspects, we can get more accurate data in advance to make better choices in the creative phase. All this is thanks to attention, emotions, and predictive analysis, on which you can base your marketing choices, leading the campaign to success. 

Key Points

• According to 52% of marketers, targeting is the priority of a marketing campaign.
• ROI is an important metric to define the success of a campaign, but it’s not enough.
• Doing predictive analytics will help you be more confident with your marketing decisions.

With marketing campaigns, the company defines a precise plan to promote a specific product or service or its brand, and thanks to these, it manages to establish a point of contact with the audience.

In general, communication campaigns have a specific purpose: to draw the user’s attention to the brand. Only in a second moment, through the involvement of the target, they try to make them a point of reference thanks to the emotions generated.

A successful campaign has several factors to consider. Some of them you will surely know, but are you sure you are evaluating all of them?

To answer this question, let’s analyze the main factors of a successful campaign and see what data you need.

One of the most important factors to consider for a campaign is the objective. Example: Do you need to increase brand awareness, or do you need to sell a product?

It may seem obvious, but a campaign with a well-defined goal is more successful than one without goals. Is the objective you want to achieve clear?

One of the best ways to define it is the SMART method, that is:

• Specific: the goal can’t be “make my brand more known”;
• Measurable: consider some metrics to track goal progress.
• Achievable: It must be realistic the company must be able to achieve what it has set out to do.
• Relevant: Is it matter to the business purpose? If the goal is not pertinent to your company’s mission, you will need to redefine it.
• Time: Establishing the time limit of the goal helps you focus on achieving it.

Now that you know why you’re creating your campaign, you need to figure out what audience segment you want to target.

According to a Nielsen report, targeting is the most valuable element in a marketing campaign for 52% of marketers.

For every target, you have a different audience segment to reach. For this reason, creating communication that “speaks” correctly to that audience segment can increase engagement. That is confirmed by the same people: in fact, according to a survey conducted by Yahoo!, on 6.000 participants, personalized campaigns, compared to generic ones, have more engagement (54%).

The reason is simple. Campaigns built for a specific audience segment, being more specific, are more likely to gain attention, managing to empathize with the target.

Beware careful because targeting is not the only important element. According to the survey conducted by Nielsen, 37% of marketers indicated creativity as one of the most crucial aspects to influence the performance of a campaign. And this is true!

Considering this fact, we need to understand what influences creativity and brings more results to a campaign.

Nowadays, the factors that influence the campaign are no longer just images, videos, or catchy texts. The explanation is: that we live in an overexposed and overstimulated context because of information. Also, the audience is careful to filter out the content that does not interest them.

Today the metrics you should consider when creating content are attention and emotions. Because, in a market full of competitors trying to attract more and more users, the game is on the attention and emotion level, two parameters that can change the result of a marketing campaign.

How to understand if you are creating quality content?

Here are some of the questions that can help you:

• Does the content grab the attention of your chosen audience?
• Does the content have value?
• It creates interesting stimuli, doesn’t it?
• Does it have the right amount of emotion to empathize with the right target segment?
• Which emotions does it elicit?
• Which emotions does it generate in line with what you want to promote and sell?

Answering these questions can help you, but evaluating objective scientific data will save your company time and budget that would likely waste away subjective bias-laden decisions.

With all the tools we have today, we can evaluate metrics such as ROI, impressions, CTR, views, Bounce Rate, and many more.

But don’t leave out attention and emotions, which have become two of the KPIs. People figure out from the get-go whether to give their attention to the content, but once they get the attention, does the message manage to excite the audience?

A study shows that content that has moved the user remains in the memory 70% more than content that does not generate any emotion.

As Professor Gerald Zaltman says, 95% of our thoughts occur in the unconscious mind, and the emotions involved in these thoughts help the target audience to decide at the right time.

Emotions and attention are not the only metrics to evaluate in a campaign, but they are the ones to keep in mind more and more because you could have a better ROI.

Photo by Kindel Media from Pexels

According to Indeed, ROI is one of the most important metrics to evaluate, it’s true, but this data only returns a general overview that allows you to understand if your marketing campaign went wrong or was successful.

However, we can’t calculate ROI before launching a marketing campaign, so if you want to get data right away that you can rely on to base your decisions, you can use predictive analytics.

In fact, according to a report by Regalix, many B2B companies and business leaders prefer to rely 65% on this type of analysis.

Why will you be able to make informed marketing decisions through predictive data?

Thanks to predictive analytics, you can understand, even before launching the campaign, which are KPIs you need to consider and which of them you can get a better result.

An example is the Italian company NeN which, through data analysis, was able to know in advance which content was the best to use and which had targeting issues, increasing ROI (here is the case study).

Calculating each one of these aspects becomes a competitive advantage for all companies because factors such as creativity, attention, and emotions are beacons that guide the user. Thus leading him to trust the brand and to ‘buy.

If you want to learn more about this topic, you can read this white paper that explains in detail the aspects that most influence your marketing campaign.