Five Steps To Better Campaigns In Data-Driven Marketing

Defining a successful campaign in a meaningful and calculable way is not easy. These five steps will help marketers identify opportunities, track spend, and calculate ROI.

It’s no secret that digital technology has enabled fresh thinking around traditional customer experience and campaign management, and brought with it a wealth of data for brands from a wide range of customer touch points.

As every marketer knows, this level of insight has become a critical part to driving a brand’s data strategy and applying an improved level of customer-centricity based on real-time personalisation.

In theory, digital technology gives marketers an opportunity to clarify and justify ROI, due in no small part to its greater reporting capability and level of transparency for KPIs. Yet, for many, it is difficult to set robust frameworks in place to measure success, and build compelling internal cases for investment in data-driven marketing to improve customer acquisition and nurture retention.

So how can data help? More pertinently, how can data be used to define meaningful and focused KPIs that accurately reflect a brand’s key objectives and ensure that they are met?

Setting Up The Criteria For Campaign Success

Campaign success looks different to every brand but depends on two things: their goals and value drivers. Typically, these fall into three key dimensions: cost savings and increasing efficiency; increasing revenue, profit, and effectiveness; and building customer engagement/loyalty. Therefore, every piece of dialogue will have a different set of KPIs to quantify its impact.

Primarily, marketers need to understand what success looks like in both a meaningful way, but more importantly in a calculable way, which will help provide a tangible figure by which to measure impact. With this they can then make informed decisions and pinpoint what worked and should be replicated, what should be refined, or, conversely, what failed and should be stopped. It also allows marketers to make a genuine business case for continuing an activity or directing budget into more profitable areas.

Technology and the flow of data are both critical to aid a real understanding around how these connections are driving the business forward.

Five Steps To Performance Measurement

Brands wanting to capture, interpret, and evaluate the correct data to improve the effectiveness of their campaign’s performance should consider these five steps:

1. Gather

Collect what information you have on your customers, highlight where it comes from, and when and how you receive it. This requires good tech connections, flexible data, and an understanding of how these connections and touch points influence and impact the customer journey to create an accurate portrayal of the data you have available to you at any moment in time.

2. Understand

When you have your data, you need to get under its skin. What does it all mean, and how does this help you interpret and decipher what customer interactions have told you about that individual and the type of segment they belong to? Refine what information is useful and what is not. Take time to shred the unwanted attributes and assemble an accurate customer view that takes into consideration individual behaviours, preferences, and level of engagement.

Crucially, this will provide the shape and structure needed to understand what interactions are possible and viable to form successful experiences and campaigns. Frequently, this requires a data presentation layer and technology to visualise the data, so don’t be afraid to really dig deep into what data you have to uncover the greatest insights.

3. Decide And Automate

So, you’ve got your shape and structure, now you can create predictive outcomes that will drive your ability to create conversations and offers based on real-time and historic behaviour–key to personalisation. The real-time part requires connected technologies, but these are driven by the data you have gathered and the understanding you have derived. Create experiences for individuals when they are most likely to resonate with them, and not batch-sent at a fixed time–which only serves to dent the brand/customer engagement.

4. Execute

This is the final step that delivers the preferred experience at a time and in a format—with the right content—that will lead to the best response. It is here technology can deliver and connect the brand, its content, and the consumer together with ease.

5. Test And Learn

Keep repeating this cycle in a way that enables you to effectively test and learn from previous experiences and campaigns to truly understand how your consumers like to be engaged with.

Whether you’re a gaming company or an automotive manufacturer, follow these proven steps and you’ll be able to identify opportunities, track marketing spend, and calculate a valid ROI across all viable channels and touch points. Technology platforms exist that enable measurement across the spectrum, consequently fuelling marketing efficiency. Brands that succeed in attributing value to consumer interactions will grow and expand their engagement with consumers as well as delivering a positive return for the brand and the board.