Marketing is an incredibly important part of any business. When done right, it brings floods of qualified customers to your doors, interested in your products or services, and ready to buy. When done poorly, marketing can have no to negative results.
One tendency that we see occur over and over is to get excited about new marketing campaigns - with no real, in-depth consideration of past campaigns. If your company has been in business for any length of time, you have created excellent marketing campaigns in the past. These campaigns had measurable results, and your marketing team can learn from them. Here’s a quick “how to” on how your team can do just that.
How to Learn from Past Campaigns
- Compare target demographics. You want to compare apples to apples. So, be sure that, before you begin, your past campaigns and your upcoming campaigns are targeting the same types of people. Otherwise, you are not getting accurate information or making correct assumptions from the get-go.
- Revisit the metrics. Each campaign should have statistics associated with every step of the process. You may find that an old campaign ad got slightly more clicks than all the rest or that a landing page seemed to attract more buyers than other pages on your site. Take a look at these successes and find out how you can incorporate them into existing campaigns.
- Always look at the failures. There will be pieces of campaigns - or even entire campaigns that did not work at all. Pick the information apart and find out what exactly did not resonate with your target demographics. It’s important to understand your failures so that they are not repeated in the future as a “fresh idea.”
- Incorporate past successes into existing/upcoming marketing campaigns. This can be one of the most difficult actions to accomplish. You are likely launching a new campaign because you want a fresh look, launching a new product, moving marketing from offline to online or you have hired a new marketing director. Each circumstance has its challenge. For example, how does one get a fresh look when incorporating successful elements from past campaigns?
