Need to improve campaign performance? Look no further!

After several weeks of looking at ways to create, reach, engage, and promote digital marketing campaigns I can’t help but feel that this week it is time to look at this week's topic question from a different angle. If I look at the topic at face value it looks like the same question as all of the previous weeks but with a different spin therefore my aim is to answer, “Finding meaningful measures to improve campaign performance?” in a different way.

The first thing that comes to mind is passion, people won’t be interested in your campaign if you truly aren’t, they can smell right away that there is no heart behind the idea. So make sure that you really believe in or are interested in whatever campaign you are working on. Passion is infectious if you love the idea and are putting energetic ideas into it others will notice.

Which brings me to my second point, be creative passion and energy is best displayed through a creative idea, or if the idea is old put your own unique spin to it. If you don’t find your campaign truly interesting and don’t think your friends will like it then it is not likely to perform well.

But don’t forget to do your homework!!! Make sure you put the time and effort into your campaign, do the research and do it properly the worst thing is to have a great creative idea but forget to keep the content up to date and relevant it like serving dinner without the meat!!

Lastly keep it simple, people are busy with their own jobs, hobbies, families…. You know their lives! So say what you're going to say already! Make it clear and concise no one like to watch a YouTube video for more than three minutes, or wait for a million images to load.

Keep in mind the old adage “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. As Brad Bender points out on IMedia Connection targeting id great for bring people to your site (bring the horse to the water) but the real challenge is determining which people will be engaged enough to participate, return, or buy (or drink the water) to do that you have to start thinking about optimization. He goes on to say, “Optimization is a systematic method of outlining your goals, challenging your assumptions to select the best media to reach those goals -- it's not always intuitive -- and modifying ad delivery accordingly. In the end, you will have a measurable output for how well your campaign performed against your original objectives.” Here are four steps he suggest to follow for better optimization:

1. Define goals
2. Segment the audience
3. Optimize, and
4. Review, assess and improve



Another great site that includes optimization but also emphasizes segmentation, integration, automation is The Top Line. Here is a summary of what author ‘bbmarketingplus’ suggests to do in increase campaign performance.

Segmentation
“focus on one segment at a time to better discern patterns” or try “work[ing] backward from the achievement of the goal to identify the behaviors that led to those actions. In so doing [you can identify] ways to improve marketing performance.”

Integration
”to improve the efficacy of your marketing efforts, it can be helpful to integrate multiple marketing tools”. For example “[Dave] integrated his CRM system, email marketing, and web analytics to identify which of 40,000 inactive prospects were the most promising.”
Another example of segmentation is “using social listening to develop your editorial calendar. You might use Tweetdeck to identify what people care about, or who is active in complementary areas, by searching on terms related to your space.”

Automation
“The next step to is automating a part or all of the process to scale your efforts and/or reduce the time you’re investing in digital marketing. You may get email-marketing software that shows you open and click-through rates. You may get sales enablement software that provides a better view into prospects’ behavior, or a tool that automatically extracts the data you require from your CRM system to prepare your campaigns.”

Optimization
“refers to the ongoing experimentation that digital marketers perform, to identify the best combination of marketing strategies and tactics for achieving their goals.”

And my personal favorite…

Talent Beats Tools
“most successful marketers will be generalists who are creative, expert at analytics, possess strong writing skills, and have a large personal following.”

In my mind this last point relates back to the beginning of my post because it shows that if you are creative, invested, and passionate about what you are doing it is going to show through your campaign.