How Successful Was Your Digital Campaign?

How successful was your digital campaign – last week?

You probably already know just how pervasive digital marketing has become in the past year. If you didn’t bump into all those people using their smartphones to check Facebook this morning, here’s what you need to know:

1. Half of the U.S. has a smartphone
2. Almost everyone in the U.S. uses Facebook several times a day

These two statements alone have been enough for nearly every brand marketer. If you’re a brand marketer, you’re using digital marketing, regardless of your online marketing budget.

As a brand marketer, when you run a digital marketing initiative, do you know whether it’s working? If you’re investing time and money into something that’s supposed to help your business succeed in this economy, you need to know how that investment is performing. You should be able to answer questions like:

• How did you define whether it is performing? Is it…a gut call? Is it based on the data? Or is it relative to a performance target set in advance?
• How often do you review performance?
• When it’s not working, what will you do?
• When it IS working, what will you do?
• What’s the ROI?
• Why is it working/not working?
• Which of your audiences is responding best to it?

If you can’t answer those questions, don’t worry – you’re not alone:

• Adobe surveyed readers of CMO.com early this year and found that more than half of them say it’s difficult to measure the success of their offline and online channels.
• eMarketer found a similar trend in April. eMarketer also found that many marketers are using a combination of metrics, but aren’t really sure how accurate those metrics are.

A brand marketer who’s running digital campaigns to improve the perception of their brand or move their audience closer to purchase and loyalty should be able to confidently answer each of those questions.

But keep in mind – there’s no single “pat” answer to each of those questions. One successful digital marketer will have a different answer to those questions than another, because the answers depend on a few factors:

1. Your business – the revenue drivers, strategy, goals, and audience
2. Your overall marketing strategy
3. The role of that digital marketing tactic in the context of your overall marketing strategy

Your digital marketing investments are just like any other kind of investment you make – they have a purpose, a timeframe, and a set of expectations and goals you’ve set for them. When an initiative is launched, smart marketers know they’ll be asked whether the initiative is successful. Fortunately, they will have established those criteria at the beginning to keep the entire project team aligned with the business objectives. Is your marketing smart?