Building, Scaling & Optimizing Powerful Campaigns

Digital marketing campaigns can be fun and, at the same time, challenging to execute. The entire process involves planning, brainstorming, designing, and ultimately delivering content that the target audience will enjoy. 

Once you make the campaign live, you can witness the results of your effort. Done right, digital marketing campaigns can be extremely rewarding. However, the rewards depend on the type of marketing campaigns you choose, how well you run them, and the campaign performance analysis. But your journey doesn’t end here.

In conversation with Shweta Sivasankaran, Marketing & Growth Head of Mensa Brands and Ex-Director of Marketing at Unacademy, we discovered a few great tips on successfully running a digital campaign. She shared her experiences of experimenting with different campaign types. Also, she gave us key insights into campaign performance analysis. Here’s a snapshot of our conversation with Shweta.

Managing Digital Marketing Campaigns Across Different Channels

Every day customers come across brands through various channels. It is through marketing campaigns that brands increase awareness, user engagement, and the likelihood of conversion. Hence, being present on the right channel with the right message at the right time is crucial. 

But, it is difficult for brands to be active on all channels at all times. Moreover, it gets tough to manage the campaigns across different channels. This is when you need automated marketing campaigns. 

Shweta Sivasankaran says, 

“A lot of channels are actually delivering great performance on automated campaigns, a lot of what's really in the control of a marketer is just technically creative bids and budget.”

There are several marketing automation platforms that enable marketers to design their campaigns based on AI-powered creatives. They offer features like AI copywriting tools, and multi-channel integrations to make the marketer’s job easier. 

With such platforms, the marketers only need to look after the creative aspects and the marketing budget. Everything else is taken care of by the automation platform or software. 

Experimenting with Visual Content in Digital Marketing Campaigns

Visual content marketing has grown in popularity in recent times. But a few marketers are still unaware of its full potential. 

According to research, 23.7% of content marketers consider visual content to be their biggest challenge. But the key to successful visual content marketing is trial and error. It is through experimentation with visual content, their formatting, placement, etc., that you can find out what works and what doesn’t. 

Video content is currently trending across marketing channels. When using video content in marketing campaigns, the format matters a lot. So, you must choose how you want to communicate your brand story to the target market. 

With the reels trending on social media platforms, short videos have suddenly gained popularity. In fact, Instagram reels receive 22% more engagement than regular video posts.

Shweta highlights her experience of experimenting with reel-like videos at Unacademy. She says, “We thought of trying out short, crisp, reel-like videos that you come across on social media. So, we actually got selfie videos of 15 to 20 seconds or CTA-driven videos, made by our educators, that went through a quality check.” 

The reel-like videos worked well for Unacademy. They contributed 70% of the total campaign revenue. 

What we can derive from here is that with the dropping consumer attention span (merely 8 seconds), we must try to deliver quality information in the shortest possible time. 

The CTA-driven reel-like videos worked well because of the quick delivery and easy-to-consume bite-sized information.

Besides the video format, you can experiment with the video content as well. For instance, the background, design, hero sections, brand USP, content language, and campaign channel used for advertising.  

Key Metrics to Measure Digital Marketing Campaign Success

Marketing metrics help to improve campaign effectiveness. If you track a certain set of KPIs, you can measure how well the campaign has performed. It will enable you to direct your campaign initiatives towards well-defined goals while making improvements in the areas that lack. 

Shweta elucidates, “There are two types of metrics that we must look into to measure the performance of the marketing campaign- on-platform and off-platform metrics.”

There are several key metrics that marketers need to track when running campaigns. However, there are a few specific ones that demand extra attention. One on-platform metric that we can look into is CTR (Click-Through-Rate). Based on your chosen platform, a high CTR means better engagement, more ad impressions, and better organic search ranks. 

Similarly, the off-platform metrics include;

• Conversion rate- the percentage of users taking action after ad interactions

• Return on ad spends- the revenue generated for each dollar spent on ads. It evaluates which methods are working and how to improve the ad campaigns in the future.

• Revenue- the total income earned in a specific period

Also, data-driven strategies work well for marketers. They can understand the customer’s buying journey through the results of a specific marketing effort. However, striking the right balance between data-driven and fresh strategies is significant. 

So, brands can use data-driven campaign strategy for some product categories whereas for others they can experiment with new strategies. 

3 Things Marketing Campaigns Analysis Can Help You With

The analysis of marketing campaigns helps with a lot of things. They reveal areas that work well and the ones that need improvement. However, the insights and analysis of campaign performances may vary from one business to another as different businesses function at different paces. 

Shweta mentions three things that campaign analysis helped her with. Here’s a gist of all three aspects. 

1. Feedback loop: The analysis helped with the feedback loop. It helped in sharing very pointed feedback with copywriters so that they can understand what works right. 

Marketing campaign analysis helps marketers to provide feedback on the ad content. Thus, designers and copywriters can understand what format and content type work best to engage the audience. 

2. Communication: The second aspect that the analysis helped with was identifying what sort of communication works for different user segments or audiences. For instance, a CTA that may work for a top-of-the-funnel audience may not work for a bottom-of-the-funnel audience. So, identifying the communication type ensures better campaign content. 

3. Content optimization: The analysis helped in understanding how users responded to a specific USP. It tells the marketer about the aspects that are better received by users than the rest. It provides an insight into your product functions and what job it does for your consumer. Once you gain the knowledge, you can apply it across all your digital and traditional marketing channels. 

The Bottom Line 

You cannot deny the importance of digital marketing campaigns in the modern business environment. You must, therefore, be familiar not only with the process of planning and executing digital marketing campaigns but also with analyzing the key metrics of campaigns to improve your ads further.