Once you’ve run a marketing campaign, it’s time to dig through that data. Read on and learn how to understand and analyse the fruits of your labour.
First and foremost, each marketing campaign is different, and therefore each campaign’s outcomes will also be different. What might be seen as successful for one marketing campaign might be a total flop for another.
Goals
One of the first steps in planning your marketing campaign, is setting your desired goals and outcomes. What do you want to achieve with your campaign? Do you want to:
- Boost sales of a certain product?
- Launch a new product?
- Advertise an event or gig?
- Grow your social following or subscribers?
- Increase fan engagement with your content?
There are so many different goals you can dream to achieve, and each will be different for each brand, business or individual.
Data & statistics
Again, during your planning stage you would have decided how to measure the success of your marketing campaign. Remember to make sure what your measuring is directly related to your goals.
For example, you’ll be wasting your time measuring your product sales when your campaign’s goals are to grow your social following.
There are multiple tools for you to measure your campaigns success, such as:
- Social media analytics (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) for social media-orientated goals.
- Google analytics for your own websites and pages.
- Sales reports from online shops (Etsy, Shopify or your own custom website).
- Word of mouth/direct feedback (comments, conversations and mentions of the product online or in person, directly from your fans/audience).
Analysis
Remembering to keep your campaign goals firmly at the front of your mind, you can now start to analyse how successful your campaign has been.
Lets say your marketing campaign had the outcome of boosting sales of a certain album. If you look at your album sales and there’s been an obvious increase, well done! Your campaign has been successful as you’ve achieved what you set out to do.
Campaigns and their outcomes won’t often be as simple as this, and ‘success‘ can be defined in different ways.
Lets say again, your marketing campaign had the outcome of boosting sales of a certain album. However, your album sales haven’t changed, but you’ve grown your social following by 10%. Would you still consider this successful?
This answer is entirely up to you and different for each brand, business or content creator. If you’re still learning marketing or a fledgling brand/business/creator, then any increase in fans, sales or followings would be successful, no matter what you set out to achieve.
If you’ve run a campaign and that you’ve gotten further away from your goals than when you started it, your campaign has been detrimental to your brand or business; examples include:
- Loss of followers/subscribers.
- Reduction in engagement.
- Sales have slowed/stopped.
If this has happened, don’t worry! It provides a great opportunity to learn about what went wrong and how you can improve on it next time. We’ve got a great article showing how you can learn from bad content performance, and use what you learnt in future marketing plans.
To sum up, you don’t have to reach your intended campaign goals for your campaign to be a success. This is because success can be defined differently for each musician, content creator, brand or business. 
As long as you enjoy what you’re making and the brand you’re creating, and your fans do too, then it’ll always be a success.
