According to Adstage blog, how do you know if your marketing campaign is working? How to do you measure the success or failure of any campaign?
How you measure a campaign can be as different as the business that’s running the campaign itself.
But beyond that, there were two trends:
- It all comes down to sales and leads. Those could be measured by revenue, by contribution to pipeline, by sales opportunities created, or by other metrics.
- Begin with the end in mind. If you want to measure the success of a campaign, define your goals for it from the beginning.
This makes sense. Every business is different, and business goals change over time. It makes sense that what could be a failed campaign for one business (better brand awareness, but no change in lead value), could be a winning campaign for another company.
1. Define your user context: While specific metrics depend on the type of marketing used, the key to effective tracking is to start before you develop your campaign. Specifically, define its objective, target audience, and user context since together these variables determine your metrics. Based on these inputs, create specific calls-to-action and associated landing pages that yield trackable results.
2. Think objectives first, tools last: To measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, you must first have an objective. What is the point of running a marketing campaign in the first place? What results do you expect to receive from that campaign? What are your KPIs? Once you establish objectives, measuring effectiveness becomes much easier. Think of objectives first, tools last, and the solution becomes easy. Tactically, you can measure just about every objective with two tools that have been around for well over a decade. 1) Campaign tracking URLs in Google Analytics. 2) Goals in Google Analytics.
3. Measure momentum and engagement: Of course, contribution to pipeline is the end goal we all aim for. My favorite way of measuring ongoing “campaigns” is momentum and engagement. How many of the assets in the campaign are prospects viewing? Am I able to get them to binge on the content or are they only giving me drive-by views? And are they sharing the content with their colleagues who could be involved in the buying decision?
4. Measure direct sales revenue: Marketing leadership must think in terms of tangible business value (bottom-line revenue production), rather than fluffy engagement/brand awareness metrics, when constructing new campaigns.
Get down to ROI: To show the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns we’ll use a combination of Google Analytics data and Salesforce lead tracking. There are a bunch of secondary metrics we report on, like organic traffic, keyword rankings, links acquired (we do a lot of SEO and PPC), and pull all this data in a Google Data Studio dashboard.
Measure campaign effectiveness in stages: I measure a campaign’s effectiveness in stages. First, did I break even on advertising? Then as the campaign continues, what’s the conversion rate? When the campaign is done, I evaluate the results and make a final call on the message, the offer, the targeting, the structure of the campaign, etc. The elements that worked, I’ll likely reuse. Everything else will be revamped.
Measure behavioral change: Marketing campaign effectiveness can be measured by many different metrics, depending on the goal of the campaign. But the one metric that is so important is whether the campaign changed the target audience’s behavior: did it change a perception, cause an action or drive an engagement? This is the fundamental metric that will trigger the other metrics we are always looking for: leads, sales, traffic, awareness, branding.
Measure the value: For prospects, did the content in the campaign provide useful information that helped them solve a business problem? For our team, what did we learn from the campaign so we can use those learnings to further optimize our new campaign? We should always be learning and optimizing.
Source: https://blog.adstage.io/2018/03/19/how-do-you-measure-campaigns-effectiveness
According to The Art Career Project bog, Storytelling is an essential part of our world and is a major creative element in books, movies, and television shows. In fact, every part of your own life can be broken down into a story, and those stories can be told through design. A graphic designer tells a story with their design in order to create a finished product that resonates with the audience.
Storytelling in Client Communications
When you work directly with a client, your ability to capture their story is important. The client may not understand the nuance of design, but they understand ROI. They want to hear how your design will impact their audience and strengthen their brand. It would be far more engaging if you were to explain that the bold font and color palette conveys trust for your target audience and show them how the layout speaks to their customer persona.
The client needs to see that you not only understand their company or brand, but that you also understand the key audience they’re trying to capture. Unless the client has a design background, they likely won’t appreciate a discussion that only centers on design techniques. Even if they do have a design background, sharing the story behind your design, and your purpose in the creation, will show them more about the process and the finished product.
Your client needs the story, and that story should include who they are and what their mission is. It should make their marketing position clear and highlight why they are the best company for their target customer. The story leads their audience through the process, highlights the emotions the design works to engage, and offers them an advantage over their current design. There’s no reason for them to make design changes unless the changes enhance their position or improve their brand in some way.
Fine-Tuning the Story Before the Creation Process
Every design project has a story. A great written story includes all the necessary elements, but it doesn’t always tell the audience exactly what they are. Instead, it evokes feelings through the actions and reactions of the characters and through careful descriptions that set the mood and tone and fill in the plot. They’re given the opportunity to engage with the story because their mind figures out these descriptive clues as they read.
In design, the words are limited. You’re telling the story through images rather than words, but it uses a lot of the same premises. You don’t want your design to be so obvious that it basically beats the audience over the head with the messaging you want to convey. All the pieces work together to bring them to the story.
Before beginning a design piece, you need to clearly understand your client and their customer. Then you need to crystalize their story. Is their story one of hope, action, joy, intrigue? These sound like hollow descriptions, but they charge your design and will help you to fully understand where the company is coming from and what their branding is so that you can capture it.
Sometimes you’ll work on a design where all the elements haven’t been working toward the same story. This can happen when multiple people have put together aspects of the design over many years. And if you can see that something is off, chances are the audience will see something is off. These types of projects can be difficult because the client may be attached to aspects of the design that simply don’t work for the current story arc. A complete rebranding is usually the best method for dealing with these types of issues, but sometimes you can think outside the box to save aspects the client is attached to.
How Your Finished Design Conveys the Story
The overall design should include all the elements of the story you’ve built. This includes the words within your copy and how you’ve chosen to highlight them. The writer is often the one developing the actual content but it’s important that the designer and the writer are in sync with the story so that their elements work together seamlessly.
In a website, for example, every aspect of the site should lend itself to the same story. Colors, fonts, placement of buttons, images, and content should all work within the arc of the story. When all of this comes together, it improves user experience and ensures that the site is easily navigated and offers the best telling of the brand story.
Source: https://www.theartcareerproject.com/graphic-designers-stories-design/
Workshop Challenge
Regarding my project outcome, personally I feel that I have tackled all the aspects of a full fledge integrated marketing campaign strategy utilizing offline, online and activation deliverables. The chosen direction was to launch the campaign doing things differently to attract attention and be the talk of the town for the first-ever EV in Bahrain by the Nissan Brand. The final delivery showcases the main features of the new EV in Bahrain which shall attract the main target audience. Potential interested customers had the opportunity to book in advance via social media for the test drive experience prior to launch. This anticipated engagement and conversation at the teaser phase. I have learned through the process to always think of alternatives and a plan B in terms of materials or design for the deliverables to come to life. Some things look great on paper but there will always be implementation or production challenges. Its very important as a designer to always work together and gain feedback from colleagues and production partners to come up with the best design and the best production solution to reach the goal of turning things to reality for the client. There were a lot of technical and logistical challenges as I am supposed to use a real-life charging station, 360 degree screens and stand, and VR technology for the launch and activations. I have had some suggestions to use advanced outdoor screen billboards for the launch. However, that type of medium is not currently available in Bahrain. Hence, I used whatever was available and new. As mentioned before, there are competitors to the Nissan Ariya, however, these have not launched yet in Bahrain. The launch is set to happen by end of 2021.
Omar Mal,
December 7, 2020
Omar Mal 