Using Data to Plan & Track Your Campaign

By: Ted Marzilli, CEO – YouGov Data Products 

Every marketing campaign has a goal. Maybe it’s to attain a certain number of impressions or conversions, to regain customers who have left the brand, or to gain new customers. If you are investing time and resources developing a campaign and buying ad space, you want to be sure that your campaign is meeting your goals.

For a campaign to run smoothly and meet expectations, a marketer needs the right tools. Data is a critical element in ensuring you develop the best campaign every time. It is essential in planning and tracking a campaign.

Planning the campaign. Setting a realistic goal is important to campaign success and relies on an understanding of your potential audience and the general industry landscape. Market research data can be valuable in helping you understand the current landscape and assess consumers’ perception of your competitors and your own brand.

Your campaign goal may be to target a specific audience demographic, like young adults, seniors, or the affluent. Another goal might be engaging former customers. Or it may be broader, such as receiving a certain type of engagement or changing brand perception more generally.

Once you’ve set a campaign goal, you must develop a plan to reach that goal. Even if your goal is not about reaching a specific demographic, you can use audience segmentation data to determine the best audience to help you reach your goal.

Once an audience is chosen, the next step is to find the best way to reach that audience. This includes finding the right channel and best content for advertisements. A fuller understanding of the target audience can help you decide whether to promote the campaign on live television programs, online streaming services, digital advertisements, or another medium.

Finally, you’ll need to determine what type of creative will resonate best with your audience. This can mean developing a single creative that hits on the common interests of your targets, or creating multiple options to focus on unique interests of the groups you are targeting. Audience profile data can help to optimize the focus points in the advertisements. Once you’ve developed the ads, you can continue to test them and get feedback using research surveys before launching the campaign.

Tracking the campaign. After the completion of a campaign, it’s important to understand its effectiveness. Marketing campaign effectiveness comes down to how well a campaign achieved the goals set out in the beginning. Did it achieve the right type of engagement? Did it reach the right audience? Was there a positive shift in brand awareness or perception?

Tracking brand-related metrics, such as awareness, attitude, and consumption during and following the campaign can show whether a campaign met its goal and whether it had any unexpected effects. Determining exposed and affected audience can also show whether the campaign reached the right audience or whether it tracked well with another, untargeted audience. By dropping pixels on advertisements, it’s possible to see what type of consumers engaged with the content online. There are also ways to utilize market research data to determine the types of audiences that were exposed to television and other types of ads.

Recontacting the targeted audience can provide a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of subtler campaign goals. For instance, if there is specific messaging used to target a particular audience, recontact surveys can determine whether the audience has begun associating these new keywords or ideas with the brand. When compared against a pre-campaign survey, this can help track a more specific shift in perception.

The value of planning and tracking a campaign. Regardless of the type of campaign you run, it is essential that you develop a strategy and evaluate your execution. In addition to justifying the expense of your campaign, understanding the data around how your campaign performed can help you more effectively plan future campaigns. Whether you’re finding new audiences to target or learning that a campaign meant to boost consideration also generated buzz, assessing the metrics of campaign success provides valuable insight for marketers regardless of industry.

About YouGov: YouGov is a leading international full-service research and data analytics company and a pioneer in the use of technology to collect higher quality, in-depth data for the world's leading businesses and institutions. With offices throughout the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, YouGov leverages its online sampling, research expertise and consulting experience to provide clients with syndicated brand perception and audience segmentation tools, quick turnaround surveys and in-depth custom research studies.