When developing a robust marketing campaign strategy, there are many different components to consider to drive success. For example, who is your target audience? Where do they spend their time? What do they care about? When are they most engaged?
The common denominator of all those questions is the consumer. Without understanding the persona you are reaching, your marketing strategy will fail to meet goals and expectations. The best way to ensure your campaign reaches the identified goals and KPIs is to take an audience-first approach. Place the consumer at the center of the strategy then base your campaign choices on those individuals.
Finding your ideal audience
Sometimes it is challenging to know who the “ideal audience” is. It often involves a lot of considerations such as customer lifetime value and advocacy. However, while often a substantial time investment, it is the most critical step in having a successful marketing campaign strategy. Here are some tips to better understanding your current customers and prospective consumers:
- Analyze your first party data: What makes your core customers similar and how can you use those learnings to find new prospects, and looking at historical quantitative and qualitative data to understand who your “best” customers are to-date
- Review Google Analytics data to reveal key insights: By looking at data cuts such as demographics, interests, and geos, your brand can gain some insight. Find out who your current customer is and ways you can use targeting them.
- Place a pixel on your site: This let’s you go a step further than Google Analytics and understand where your audience is highly indexing in terms of behaviors, interests, and demographics
- Use audience research tools: By using panel-based research, you can better understand consumer thoughts, opinions, and decisions that are driving behaviors
Maximizing campaign success through placements
Identifying the right media channels should be a balance of your business objectives and the audience scale on each platform.If the goal is to truly get in front of as many people as possible, billboards may be best investment.However, if you need a more targeted approach with cost-efficiency metrics to optimize against, understand creative performance that is moving the needle, and gain insight into your top performing audiences, digital is likely the way to go.
Now, whether you choose video, social, display, or search depends on your goals. However, having a full-funnel strategy is almost always the ideal way to guide the consumer journey.
Cutting through the clutter with the ideal message
Consumers are confronted with thousands of ads a day, which makes it easy for them to ignore. So how do brands make an impact? For many, the answer is personalization. Personalization can mean a lot of different things. And, it can be done effectively without feeling invasive. Personalization can include aligning copy and messaging to:
- Your audience’s interests
- The time of the day for the consumer
- The location of the consumer
- The consumer’s stage of life
- The consumer’s demographics
- Where the consumer is in their journey with the brand
It’s also important to consider what is distinctive and relevant. Distinct brand assets are consistent sensory & semantic cues (i.e. colors, logos, taglines, jingles, etc.) that makes it easier for consumers to identify your brand and recall the selling points associated with it. Yet, understanding the most impactful components of a creative requires analysis. This can involve A/B testing various messages, imagery, and CTAs. It can even be conducting a panel-based survey to hear first-hand from consumers. Brand growth occurs when marketers leverage their distinctive brand assets effectively to build mental availability with the consumer.
Determining marketing campaign success
Evaluating whether your marketing campaign was a success depends on your definition. Coegi always aligns the campaign measurement strategy to business goals; however, how granular the measurement insights are dependent on client expectations. If the goal was awareness, some brands feel satisfied by hitting an ideal reach and frequency. Thus, using media metrics will be sufficient. However, if a brand wants to show an incremental life in unaided brand awareness, that will require an advanced measurement strategy.
At the end of the day, remember is to prioritize the data that matters most to your business. Don’t get distracted by vanity metrics that do not answer the question of whether you achieved your company goals.
