The pain points of a marketing campaign

This is a guest post from Yasmin Russell, head of marketing at digital agency Engage.

There are a number of things that can cause issues during a marketing campaign, from KPIs to time, however there are things that can be done to mitigate these problems and even solve them to ensure a campaign runs effectively. 

KPIs
It’s essential to establish the KPIs of a campaign early on. Not having clear KPIs when starting a campaign can lead to unrealistic targets being set, or KPIs that don’t reflect what the client is looking to achieve with the campaign.

Realistic KPIs, in particular, are crucial. A client’s expectations must be managed to ensure achievable goals for a campaign are set at the start of the relationships. There’s no point in having a client expecting to achieve one million followers in one month, for example, as this generally simply isn’t possible.

The user journey
If the full user journey hasn’t been considered, it’s very likely that there’ll be touchpoints that are missed which therefore don’t portray a consistent message, including copy and creative.

It’s important to ensure the campaign offers users or consumers a cohesive journey to keep them on the right path that aligns with key objectives, such as awareness. A cohesive user journey can be developed through a number of avenues such as making sure the campaign has a consistent look and feel to support memorability, or ensuring every step of the journey is optimised to support conversion.

The audience
It’s very easy to forget that the audiences you’re trying to target are actually made up of individual people. Marketing is about giving an audience what they want, not what the marketer or company wants.

People are increasingly savvy to overtly advertising content. People will often go online to achieve a goal, escape, be entertained, or informed, and content and campaigns should be tailored to meet these goals.

A campaign shouldn’t just be posted and begin running. It’s important to build a community and rapport with an audience. This can include replying to DMs in good time, responding to comments, and resharing tagged posts.

Taking the target audience on a journey through a campaign and considering all aspects of the marketing funnel is crucial, as people are often unlikely to part with their money on the first touchpoint.

The checkout journey
The checkout journey is crucial to engage users and encourage repeat purchases. It’s very frustrating for a user to reach the point of purchase, only for them to give up because the checkout journey takes too long or some of the fields are broken.

Offering Apple Pay, PayPal, Google Pay and other systems, alongside taking the time to optimise and user test this part of the journey is very important.

More time
Campaigns can always do with more time than is available, particularly for any company trying to reach a seasonal deadline. For example, receiving a Christmas brief in December isn’t ideal.

Working one month ahead is a good place to start, while big seasonal events should ideally have planning and ideation begin at least one quarter in advance. By setting realistic goals and expectations a marketing campaign will run much more smoothly, and be more likely to achieve the KPIs that have been set.

Feedback
Feedback on a marketing campaign can be tricky to navigate, particularly when balancing best practice with brand requirements and personal opinions.

There’s always going to be a degree of both subjective (for example, disliking text colour), and objective (the price being incorrect) feedback. It’s important to rationalise any choices and keep an open dialogue on these points. As for objective feedback, the more detailed the brief and the more people that proof the campaign before it goes live, the less likely objective feedback will be required.

For more on building strong campaigns, read this guest post from Taxi For Email’s Email Evangelist Elliot Ross on how to build strong foundations for a successful email campaign.