No company today can grow and thrive without marketing. The general rule of thumb for companies is to invest around 20% of all profits in this department. It is calculated that sooner or later, the business will benefit from it and have a valuable return on investment.
Back in the day, marketing consisted of mouth to mouth strategy, spreading the word among people about the company’s work. Then, it grew to commercials in newspapers, radio, and TV. With the rise of the internet, things took an entirely different turn, and now advertising is a massive market, estimated to be more than $2 trillion globally.
Today’s digital marketing alone is worth over $480 billion. This marketing field is so complex that only a dedicated agency using all sorts of tools can run proper business marketing. There are so many paths to take and campaign options to choose from.
If you run a company and you’re thinking about marketing, it’s best to hire an agency for the job, but not all businesses have the capacity to do it. Some are one-person efforts, and that means marketing is done completely by that same person.
In a situation like this, one must learn everything about marketing basics and try to benefit from it using the available strategies. With various types of campaign options, choosing only one is not easy.
What Types of Campaigns Are There?
There are more than a dozen different advertising campaign solutions. As a marketer, we need to tailor one that will be perfect for the organization trying to improve its business. You can’t use the same tactics for advertising, selling products, and offering services, just as you can’t use the same when selling online and owning a local shop.
There’s no general rule for what will work best. Some companies find out that one strategy works better for them, while others are more satisfied using something entirely different than their competitors. The key is to test, analyze, and make conclusions over time.
If you’re wondering what some of the most commonly used advertising tactics are, follow up and see the list to learn about them. Here are some of the most frequently used advertising campaign types:
- Traditional marketing – using ads on TV, radio, newspapers
- Rebranding – Changing the company’s colors and letting everyone know about it
- SEO campaign – Search Engine Optimisation and attracting consumers through search engines
- Social Media presence – Attracting consumers through social networks
- Email marketing – reaching out to customers with new offers and news through the email
All of these have subcategories and specifications to make marketing more efficient. For example, as part of the SEO campaign, an agency may decide if it’s wiser to go with paid advertising or aim for organic visits. The key is getting a better click-through rate by spending less.
What are the Most Important Metrics?
Regardless of what kind of marketing tactic you choose, there are particular metrics you must follow to ensure your campaign is doing great. There are multiple metrics to observe. Some of them are:
- conversion rate
- bounce rate
- return on ad spend
- keyword rankings
- number of page visitors
- reach for your social media posts, etc.
You’ll need various tools to track all these things. Most people will go the old-fashioned way and install Google Analytics and a bunch of other programs to provide this information, while others will opt for modern, technologically advanced solutions tracking all ad segments into one, such as Voluum, for example.
Either way is good if it provides the data you need to see if your marketing campaigns are headed in the right direction. But why is this so important? Isn’t simply investing in advertisements on search engines enough to get the people coming to your page? Absolutely not.
There are several things to mind before paying Google or someone else to place a link on top of the search engine results page. The first and foremost crucial detail is what keyword you’ll pay the ad for. You need to pay for particular keywords when you want to see your website on top of the SERPs, which means choosing the perfect ones is vital.
You can’t expect your page to come up first for whatever people search for globally. Minding what people search for, and choosing the right keyword that will ultimately make users click and convert, is what you must guess. Looking into this data, or following this metric, will give you an insight into what move to make next and have effective campaigns.
Types of Tracking
Digital marketing is constantly changing. Technology is moving forward, and so are marketing agencies’ strategies. Google, as the most popular search engine worldwide, makes regular changes to its algorithm, and acting adequately to follow the trends is crucial.
As we mentioned above, there are multiple ways to track your ad campaign success. If you’re going with traditional marketing and displaying an ad in newspapers, radio, or TV, there’s no other way to get info on how many people saw your ads. You can get some insights by the medium you paid for the ad, but this is rarely precise.
When it comes to digital marketing, all data is accessible. You can monitor and inspect literally every click. Suppose we’re talking about an SEO campaign. You can find out most of the information about your campaign through Google Analytics and the Google Search Console. Valuable data about the consumers is available – which gender had the highest CTR, what age group is the most interested in your content, and many other things.
If you’ve invested in social media campaigns, you get precise analytics from the platforms. Some of them run live stats about your posts. For example, Twitter gives you a direct insight into the success of every tweet – impressions, engagement, profile views, detail expands, etc.
Still, particular software solutions, most often not free, will give you an even deeper look into the social media campaign timeline. Using some of the best ones, you’ll get access to information like what devices people use to click your tweet, where they are located, and even their interests.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, all this information became seamless to get. Specialized analytics software dives deep into the internet protocols and is able to find nearly anything you’d like. Of course, all these solutions do not come cheap but will provide tremendous value for your advertising campaigns and the company itself.
Tracking is essential for business owners and marketers running campaigns to see if their efforts are paying off or if they need to make changes. With these methods, software, and analysis, they can set the perfect conversion rate optimization, and raise the profits of the company, thus making the marketing campaigns successful.
Is it Possible to Create a Marketing Campaign for Free?
Of course, you can do marketing for free. It’s 2022, and everyone has access to the internet, meaning everyone on the planet is a potential customer. To be precise, around 5 billion people globally are online, of which 307.2 million are in the States and almost 700 million in Europe.
Most of these people are also available on social media. If you have ever opened Facebook, YouTube, or some other social networks, you know that they are entirely free for everyone. Setting up personal business profiles allows you to reach all these potential customers quickly.
Now, this is obviously easier said than done, but your marketing performance depends on your efforts, dedication, and skills. Not everyone has the talent to come up with content that will go viral and advertise your company, which is why companies dedicate this role to digital marketing agencies.
Still, the answer to the question “is it possible to create a marketing campaign for free” is Yes, it is possible. For true results, you’ll most probably want to invest money, time, and resources, though. We live in times when everything worthy comes with its price.
How to Measure the Success of Your Campaign
Every marketing campaign has a different meaning of the word success. A campaign aiming to raise a particular company’s brand awareness shouldn’t worry about making more sales. Still, an influencer marketing campaign cares deeply about how many consumers discover the benefits of the particular product or service the business provides.
With this being said, the marketing agency or the company itself needs to set priorities, goals, and objectives before the start of the campaign. Multiple milestones are essential to track the success of the efforts, and not meeting them will mean altering the strategies to maximize the effects.
Although different for every business and campaign, some measuring ways are used by everyone. Here are the most frequently used:
- Setting goals
- Projecting a timeline
- Identifying your Key Performance Indicators
- Setting expected ROI
- Valuable data generation
All these are general points, and they might not work for all businesses and marketing efforts. Every campaign needs to set these goals before kicking off and strictly highlight what is considered a success and where the team will need to take action and make a turn in the strategy.
A campaign always needs a timeline. This way, the team working on the project will know what they need to work on and how to react when a particular milestone is reached. If the milestone isn’t reached within a given timeframe, things need to be pushed in another direction.
The Key Performance Indicator or KPI is a specific success measurement. All niches and all businesses within a particular niche will have a differently tailored one. Suppose you’re developing a marketing campaign for a retail store. You’ll most probably focus on sales per square foot over a period of time, ROI, consumer retention rate, etc. Still, even different retail stores within the same brand may have different KPIs.
Not all campaigns are dedicated to sales, though. As we mentioned previously, some of them are for strengthening the brand. These situations will require an entirely different approach, and success here is measured in other ways. Generating a particular amount of data per user, finding out what retention users like, and developing various communication channels, are some of the things to consider before announcing a successful campaign.
When a Campaign is Considered a Success
We previously mentioned that every advertising campaign is different and needs to be treated as such. A campaign can be considered successful and brought to an end when the KPI and the objectives set at the beginning are met.
Once the milestones and the timeline are brought to an end, the goals of the campaign are achieved, and the reason for which the marketing team is created in the first place, you can say that the job is done successfully. At that moment, it’s time to start thinking about a new task and begin developing a new campaign.
If you’ve been rebranding, your results will be visible after a long period when people accept the new logo, design, and everything you rebranded, eventually showing more profits. An SEO campaign, though, is easily announced successful when the page reaches the first few spots in the SERP.
Building a social media page with many followers and regular viral posts is also considered a successful campaign. Seeing consumers ordering products through the links provided in the email and surpassing the ROI expectations is also a successful advertising campaign.
Conclusion
With everything written above, you should clearly understand what an advertising campaign is and why tracking it is so valuable. With the multiple tools a marketer can use to track how the campaign is going, they can measure the progress, see the direction it is headed, and bring it to a successful end.
The first thing to do is set the objectives, goals, and think about what the ad campaign should do for the company. Based on this, you should choose the proper channels and inspect what the main requirements to make it successful are.
Once it’s out there, you’ll need to download specific software for the type of advertisement you’re running. You can choose between traditional tools like Google Analytics or the native social media analytics or dedicated software and programs that do the work on a much greater and more sophisticated level.
Finally, it’s entirely OK for a campaign to run faulty initially. Using this knowledge, you will know where to make changes and develop the perfect campaign that will provide excellent results.
