Measuring the success of your integrated marketing campaign should include a thorough, big-picture understanding of your efforts rather than simply reviewing individual channel data. Doing only the latter helps you understand channel performance but doesn’t always provide a clear assessment of the end- user experience. We’ll offer an easily digestible breakdown of how your campaign’s end-user journey needs to be tracked and how to use real-time data to make strategic updates to an ongoing campaign to achieve optimal results.
When you assess the health of your organization’s integrated marketing campaign through a big-picture lens, you'll be better assured of seeing big-time results.
Far too often, organizations claim victory on their integrated marketing campaign after viewing only a snapshot. That's problematic as it can encourage sticking with a strategy that is successful in one area, say, increased social media engagement, but then lacking in meeting the campaign's main goal, like, completing online form fills. Success with one touchpoint on a campaign with several — social media, email marketing, digital ads, search engine optimization and more — doesn't immediately equate to an entirely successful campaign.
For example, if you look only at paid advertisements and determine from the data that your campaign is meeting benchmarks for a click-through rate on Google ads, that may look like you got the results you were after. But in this scenario, say the goal is to drive traffic to the website to engage with specific content. If you’re not tracking the fact that X percent of people are coming to this website from X touchpoints and actually spending time engaging with your content, how can you say your campaign is successful when you don’t have all the necessary data?
Data Directs the Pivot
Understanding the big picture also means understanding when to change things up. A comprehensive view of your data best positions you for making the call on when to pivot your strategy. That’s because when you integrate the data from all of your campaign’s touchpoints, you gain a nuanced understanding of your end users, empowering you to quickly and effectively move to meet their evolving demands.
Even when you follow a holistic approach to data collection, it doesn't necessarily translate to immediate campaign success. Your strategy may not hit the bullseye on the first shot, but how you use your data to course correct will better ensure that you attain your desired outcomes.
Your data helps you make informed decisions and drive meaningful results. It can reveal patterns, identify trends and ultimately help you map the holistic journey of your end user. Data assists your marketing campaign efforts through:
- Audience segmentation: This helps you segment your audience based on demographics, behavior and other criteria. It offers you the ability to facilitate personalized targeting, so that each message resonates with the right audience at the right time.
- Cross-channel attribution: Consumers increasingly engage with brands across multiple channels before making a purchase decision. Your holistic data can clarify the contribution of each of your touchpoints to the conversion process. By accurately attributing conversions to the respective touchpoints, you can garner insights into the most effective channels and can then optimize your marketing spend accordingly.
- Content optimization: Data analytics helps you optimize content for maximum impact. By analyzing engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and other content performance metrics, you can refine less-than-effective content strategies, tailor messaging to specific audience segments and create content that drives desired outcomes.
- Real-time insights: You can leverage real-time analytics to monitor campaign performance, identify emerging trends, and make timely adjustments to optimize results. Whether it's tweaking ad creative, adjusting targeting parameters, or reallocating budget, real-time insights enable agile decision-making in response to changing dynamics.
Connecting the Dots with Data
Fully understanding the impact of every touchpoint is vital to understanding the big picture. Taking a holistic view of your data is going to raise the floor of your baseline. In other words, you'll have a clearer view of your strengths to help you better focus your efforts on your desired end result.
Securing this data, though, can often be met with challenges. Those come in the form of data inaccessibility due to organizational silos, privacy concerns, data quality issues and the need for specialized talent to help analyze and interpret the data. This occurs even in the most connected organizations working together to meet a shared goal. However, with the right strategies and technologies in place, including an integrated strategy mindset, these challenges can be overcome.
By investing in data integration platforms, implementing solid data governance frameworks, and prioritizing data privacy and security, among other measures, you can get the data you need to drive results. These are essential steps to creating a collaborative environment, one in which data is easily shared among relevant parties. Moreover, advancements in technology, such as AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning, present new opportunities to extract actionable insights from data more efficiently and effectively to help you better achieve your desired end result.
All in the Big Picture
Measuring the success of your integrated marketing campaign should include a thorough, big-picture understanding of your efforts rather than simply reviewing individual touchpoint data. Doing only the latter helps you understand channel performance but doesn’t always provide a clear assessment of the end-user experience.
Effective use of comprehensive data helps you gain meaningful insights into consumer behavior, optimize marketing strategies and deliver personalized experiences that resonate with your target audience. From audience segmentation and cross-channel attribution to content optimization and real-time insights, an approach utilizing comprehensive data will help you effectively engage with your end users across multiple touchpoints to achieve marketing campaign success.
Derek Blaszak, Director of Business Development at Element, a fully integrated marketing agency, blends strategic vision with hands-on execution to drive impactful digital marketing campaigns. With over 15 years of experience integrating sales and marketing, he has helped hundreds of clients across multiple industries grow their businesses.
