There’s no such thing as a marketing campaign that’s totally unpredictable. While some may exceed your expectations by going viral for the right reasons, success should never come as a surprise. Great marketing professionals consistently hit their goals — and marketing flops should be an anomaly for your team.
If you want to achieve stellar campaigns back-to-back-to-back, you need more than excellent strategies. You need a team that’s primed for continual marketing campaign improvement.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can maximize your team’s learning opportunities and implement your findings in your digital campaigns. Keep reading to ensure your marketing campaign results only get better with time.
Consider creating new roles on your team
Marketing strategist, marketing director, brand manager — these titles are commonly seen on traditional marketing teams. Many companies additionally hire specialists who are focused on specific aspects of marketing, like copywriters, product marketers, and SEO experts. These roles are all focused on present tasks and next steps that can move a business toward its ideal future.
There’s nothing wrong with hiring people to fill these positions. In fact, each of these roles is likely essential for the success of your campaigns. But if you want to optimize your team for continuous improvement, you also need marketing professionals who focus on taking the past into account — for one, a market research analyst.
Hire a market research analyst to compare present market conditions to historical market data, so your team can proactively identify trends and opportunities that your campaigns can capitalize on. Your analyst can also help you accurately assess the success of past campaigns and identify where there’s room for improvement.
If you don’t have room for a new full-time analyst in your budget, you can still optimize your team in one of two ways. First, you can work with freelancers who can support your marketing team on an as-needed basis. Alternatively, consider shifting the roles of existing team members based on their skills. If you take this route, create a change management plan that outlines how you’ll help your marketing team adjust to their new roles and workflows. For instance, you can schedule training sessions or hold an all-hands meeting that allows for two-way dialogue about the shift.
Collect and analyze the right data
Each time you run a digital campaign, you can collect an abundance of data about its performance — link clicks, conversion rates, response rates, and more. But simply having data isn’t enough to improve your marketing campaigns. An optimized marketing team should have a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) that they continuously track. KPIs are metrics that are relevant to your campaign goals and can help you spot areas for growth.
For instance, if you want to maximize the number of leads who purchase clicking on your website URL, you could track your website bounce rate. Additionally, you could use an analytics tool like the Google Analytics Behavior Flow report or a heatmap tool like Hotjar to see how visitors are moving through and engaging with your site. If website visitors aren’t following your ideal customer journey, you’ll know where changes are needed.
Consider collecting data that’s relevant to your broader industry, too. For instance, tracking related search terms and their monthly search volumes with a tool like Google Trends or Wordtracker helps you understand what your audience is presently interested in. Every campaign is affected by external factors you can’t control (like changing consumer preferences and current events), but this data helps you generate campaigns that are highly relevant to your target audience.
Analysts shouldn’t exclusively look at data after a campaign. Even during a campaign, you need to keep a close eye on the right metrics to determine how you can further fine-tune your marketing before the campaign ends.
Test before you launch a campaign
There’s no better way to ensure a marketing campaign’s success than to gather insights directly from your target market. Performing A/B testing, in which customers are shown two different versions of a campaign, is a quick way to identify which campaign will perform best. For instance, two segments of your email subscribers may see different headlines.
If you want to get more in-depth insights than A/B testing can provide, consider holding focus groups or conducting user surveys to get your audience’s thoughts on your campaigns.
When user testing becomes a permanent part of your team’s processes, you’ll be primed for continual marketing campaign improvement.
All marketing teams that produce consistently great campaigns have two things in common: great communication and alignment. While marketing leaders don’t have to involve every team member in their strategy sessions, every employee should share the same goals, understand what must be improved, and know how they can improve their contributions to future campaigns.
Holding retrospective meetings at the end of every campaign is a great way to reflect and encourage open communication. During a retrospective, your marketing leaders can share insights and address issues, then work with team members to identify opportunities and create clear action points. Together, your marketing team will be able to make a game plan for potential challenges — all before starting strategy sessions for the next campaign.
To keep individual employees accountable for achieving your team’s desired results, make sure to assign tasks and campaigns to specific team members.
Learn from your mistakes (and successes)
When you want to improve your marketing campaigns, you need to start by improving your marketing team and roles, and the processes followed. Improve your data analysis by gathering helpful data — before, during, and after your campaigns — and hiring marketing analysts who can pull smart, actionable insights from that data. Then, make retrospective meetings a part of your campaign process to ensure you’re always learning from your mistakes and your successes. As you optimize your marketing team, results are bound to follow. Campaigns that once seemed unpredictable will be managed and improved with greater ease.
