The science behind a successful marketing campaign

The science of commercial success typically relates solely to the quality or desirability of a product and a price point.

Given that most companies use the digital media platform to promote and sell their products and services, a deeper understanding of how to measure the outcome of any campaign, determining where the focus should fall should be a key performance indicator.

Simply put, a branding campaign is based on the core concept that if a positive message is generated about a company, then any audience will come to believe that perception… provided the product/service maintains the message.

However, a marketing campaign drills down to highlight these products and services, stressing either their unique attributes or a time-specific message, and even details such as where they are available – as well as special offers, discounts, in-store or app-based promotions.

Finally, a sales campaign is primarily carried out to acquire new customers and may involve having an open house, free consultations - either face-to-face or digitally, or through the organisation of country- or city-specific roadshows.

Three aims with one goal to boost the corporate bottom-line – but the skill lies in how to blend and match these goals and outcomes, dovetailing sales with marketing, and reinforcing the message with strong branding.

But, depending on how a company approaches market entry and its growth ambitions, any development strategy should be one that starts by using metrics to define the appropriate campaign.

* A branding campaign should be about retaining and increasing the reputation of a company or organisation that values trust, integrity and diversity;

* A marketing campaign needs to highlight the products and services being sold, alerting potential buyers in a new market or reinforcing existing loyalties;

* Aimed at generating ‘warm’ leads, a sales campaign should ensure conversion of these leads into profitable clients.

* In all cases, the one sure way to gather metrics on the success of the campaign is through digital channels – it is essential that corporate digital data be geared up pre-launch to measure information and relate increased sales to particular aspects of campaign fulfilment.

This can be as simple as tracking the number of click-throughs following a call to action on a corporate website, and using analytics to underscore the return on investment in online marketing with almost immediate effect.

The hosting company used by most corporates can provide a basic website statistics tool that can collect and collate this information, although there are a host of alternative options, both free and at a cost, with details available from the following companies:

* Google Analytics

* StatCounter

* Yahoo! Web Analytics

* WebTrends

Reliable monitoring of website traffic is essential – for branding, marketing and sales.

Data on the number of visitors to a website, with variations according to marketing prompts; their geographical location; from which website they came (the referring site), and the ‘landing page’, (not necessarily a company homepage); number of pages views, time spent on a website and the bounce rate – how many visitors reach a website but leave again almost immediately.

Essentially, the type of information can be pulled up to paint a picture of the performance and attractiveness of a corporate website – enabling analysis of which pages and products are more popular than others to feed back into development strategy.

* Test and modify

The roadmap is not simple, and any campaign should be road tested in its initial phase to see what works best: running different combination of content on a website at the same time, for instance, with visitors seeing different images, headings and body text to determine if any change increases conversion rates.

Again, there is professional help at hand to simplify analytics data to a more user friendly format, with products including Google Analytics Content Experiments, a free website optimisation tool that is part of Google Analytics’ set of features; Personyze, a commercial website personalisation tool; and Test&Target, a commercial website optimisation tool.

And, while these tools can help refine any campaign metrics, those new to the science should be wary of reading too much into figures.

High traffic on any corporate website is good, but not necessarily an indication of impending success. Many websites boost visibility and clicks, but these figures do not specify if those visitors become customers, donors or supporters – only refined branding, marketing and sales promotions can generate concrete success.

— The writer is a Dubai based brand and marketing consultant. Follow her on twitter @Tanita_Sandhu