I am always striving to challenge and improve myself both personally and in my role as General Manager. By nature, I am an analytical person – I have a thirst for knowledge, facts and figures. But, what I enjoy the most is analysing figures to come up with theories and strategies. As the majority of the team at Brandwave know, I am fairly competitive (did you all see I recently won the Brandwave Bake off?), and I like to set and be set goals, targets and push to ensure we improve month on month, year on year.
I strongly believe that brands and businesses (if they are not already doing so) should be taking the same approach to their marketing campaigns and initiatives. Measuring success is key but even more important I believe are the learnings you take from those measurements, and how you apply them to grow and improve. So, why is this so important and how should you do it?
Why measure campaigns or initiatives?
The three most important points for me are:
- Marketing can be one of the biggest investments to a brand or business, therefore it is key to ensure that you see a return on investment.
- To confirm whether a campaign or initiative has hit its overall objectives
- To gain more in-depth insights into your consumers and their behaviours in order to feed into future initiatives, campaigns or strategy.
- Data enables you as a brand or business to make informed future decisions
What actually constitutes a successful campaign or initiative?
Success can be seen in a number of different ways – social likes, shares and engagement, increased brand awareness, lead generation or as straight forward as an increase in sales.
Success really depends on what the overall objective is, so the important point here is before you embark on a campaign or initiative, be very clear as an organisation on the key objective you want to achieve and how that could be measured.
The technological advancements in the last few years are eye opening, we can measure everything from social engagement, to brand search terms, website analytics, call tracking, sales figures, data capture so it maybe an offline campaign but that doesn’t mean that measurement cannot be captured.
KPI’s and Benchmarking
Two great buzz words I love to use but what do they mean and why are they important?
KPI’s – key performance indicators are a quantifiable measurement you set to gauge how you are achieving. A KPI should feed into a common business or organisational goal that ultimately should push you to achieve growth or improvement.
Benchmarking – comparing your achievements against how you performed in previous campaigns, or time periods.. Or alternatively benchmarking your performance over that of others.
Using KPI and benchmarking with your marketing means you will not only be capturing those measurements but setting goals which feed into the bigger picture of the business or organisation. Bench marking is key to monitor performance or improvements over set periods of time, previous initiatives or simply against how your competitors are performing.
The future…
We’ve got to my favourite bit. As we’ve established measuring success is key to whether we have achieved; our overall objectives, ROI and KPI’s. But for me the information that we have captured during this measurement process is gold, that can be anything from consumer behavioural insights to information on brand awareness and recognition, even to the experience of going through the process of delivery as a brand or organisation itself. This information should be reviewed and evaluated to ensure that it is used to effectively to improve future campaigns, initiatives and business process.
In Brandwave, at the end of each project both client and internal as a team we sit down and evaluate the project, this enables us to capture lessons learnt to improve future projects, business processes and systems. We then implement these team wide with supported training.
For me, the ultimate end goal is always to challenge, how can I do better, what can I improve and how will this contribute to the business strategy, goals and objectives.
