Tips on gauging a campaign’s effectiveness

How successful was my marketing campaign?

While this can be challenging to answer, it’s important to ask the question. Shmuli Rosenberg, CEO of fwd/NYC Marketing has led some of today’s most high-profile marketing campaigns. Here he shares tips on gauging a campaign’s effectiveness:

Every marketing campaign needs to have clearly delineated goals.

It’s the only way to determine whether or not the campaign was successful. No matter how big or small the campaign — or how concrete or intangible the goal is — it’s critical to clearly outline your definition of success and how to ascertain those results.

Use trackable links and proper analytics for digital ads.

(You can use JCN, Google, or any other PPC-type platform.) This allows you to easily determine the success of the advertising. And aside from establishing whether the campaign as a whole was successful, each individual ad’s results can be tracked in great detail.

Multiple mediums are more complicated.

When you advertise in many newspapers and place press releases on various sites, it’s much more complicated to track the individual components of a campaign. However, since the goal is clearly defined — such as fundraising an amount or attendance at an event — you can see whether or not your campaign was successful. Though you may not be able to conclude exactly what worked and corroborate it scientifically for the next time, at least you can determine if the overall campaign was successful.

Brand awareness campaigns are very tricky.

It can be very difficult to determine if a brand awareness campaign was successful. How do you gauge awareness of an idea or brand among the general population?

This is a very tricky question. At times, experience can tell you what success looks like. Over time you learn that the majority of people who see an ad or are impaacted by a message do not provide feedback. So, after doing many campaigns, you may learn that 50 reply emails or social media engagements are a good sign of market saturation in a given demographic because the 50 people that responded may represent 50,000 people. In these campaigns, I like to include some digital element, even if only a video or other digital release, that gives us some sense of the virality and viewer click count. It’s not a perfect science because it’s based on one or two components without measuring the campaign as a whole, but I do find it advantageous.

A call to action does not necessarily bring accurate results.

Campaigns sometimes utilize coupon codes, email signups or free downloads, hoping to use this call to action to help track results. You may get lucky with a lot of downloads or signups, but usually, it’s much less than what you expected or hoped for and does not accurately reflect the success of the campaign.

 Print and digital offer different advantages.

When you advertise in print, you get something tangible that people can hold in their hands. A compelling ad with great artwork can be highly effective. I recently ran a large-scale campaign, where we went well into multi-millions of dollars in sales and donations. We reached tens of thousands of people with only print and absolutely no digital advertising. In a case like this, we know that our advertising worked, but it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint the results of any specific ad.

An indisputable advantage of digital is that you get to track success precisely. With a print campaign, you start hearing feedback from people, you see that sales and donations go up, you watch the increase in interest in the product or service, and then you know that something must be working, but you can’t track the specifics.

Are surveys effective?

Is it effective to rely on surveys (such as, “Where did you see our ad?”) when tracking the effectiveness of a particular ad? Based on experience and experiments, I’ve become skeptical about all sorts of polls used to determine campaign success.

It’s difficult to remember exactly where we saw one ad out of the hundreds we saw that week alone. When you ask people where they spotted something or recognize an ad from, they’re usually not sure. We often just default to our favorite publication or what we think the most popular publication is, because then it sounds like we’re giving the best answer to the question.

I will never leave the office until….

I used to think it was “until the work is done.” As I became more experienced, I realized that not all work is created equal. Some work, say for a client, is time sensitive, other work may not be time bound. Every day I load my most critical tasks directly into my calendar and prioritize that work first. This way, even if the unexpected arises later in the day, I can still expect to get done what matters most.

—Tzvi Zicherman, Partner/Executive Vice President of Finance — LTC Ally

Is it worth it to delegate something when it still will take so much of your time and attention?

It’s all in the math. Think of your time as being worth $100 an hour and your employee’s time as costing $15 an hour. If you did a project yourself in 45 minutes, that cost your company $75 in your time. If you delegate it to them, even if it took that person 60 minutes and still takes you 15 minutes to perfect their work, then it only costs the company $40 for both of your time. Here’s the big kicker: don’t look at how many total minutes were spent, look at your minutes — if it saves you 30 minutes, that’s an extra 30 minutes that you can spend elsewhere at $100/hr.

This example is only with a difference of 30 minutes…. Imagine the financial impact if you could save an hour. That’s the power of delegation! Give everything a dollar amount, and calculate the risk. Delegating may still demand your time and attention, but it’s the secret to scaling your business!

—Ira Zlotowitz, Founder of GPARENCY: CRE Marketplace of the Future

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 942)