What Did You Learn from Your Last Marketing Campaign?
Before you start planning the next marketing campaign, here are questions to ask about your last marketing campaign.
- What were the objectives of our last campaign?
- Who was our target audience for the last campaign?
- Did everyone involved, including our vendors, understand our audience and our objectives beforehand? How do we know everyone understood?
- Was the campaign messaging consistent with our brand?
- How did we measure our success? What were our benchmarks in key performance areas?
- Did we succeed or fail according to that measurement?
- Did we succeed according to different criteria?
- Did anything happen we weren’t expecting?
- When did the campaign start? When did the campaign end?
- Did the campaign end at the right time? Was it too short or too long?
- Did we meet our deadlines 100 percent of the time?
- Are we using the most cost-effective technology?
- How well did our vendors perform at the tasks they were assigned?
If you can’t answer the questions, that’s okay. Just make sure that your next campaign is set up so that can answer them then. For instance, to answer when a campaign started and ended, you have to choose start and end dates. Sounds simple, but not every marketer thinks in blocks of time.
Another example is to know how you’re going to measure success. If you don’t set benchmarks, you can’t draw conclusions about the effectiveness of your planning. You might be surprised to find out that what you thought was a branding campaign results in direct sales or lead generation, in which case you might change your criteria for a similar campaign in the future.
