Aim for the Bullseye, then Try Again

Every marketing and advertising campaign needs associated metric goals and reporting. These key performance indicators (KPIs) help you tailor the future of your marketing team [or allocation if you wear multiple hats].

When asked “Is your marketing successful?” 43% of CoSchedule’s surveyed group answered neutral or lower. If almost half are undecisive or unsatisfied, that’s a lot of wasted effort. But did you know that cognitive computing can help you aim your campaigns more closely to your audience and speed up the fine-tuning of your campaign styles?

As discussed in the first two parts of this series, marketing and advertising campaigns are a mixture of creative thinking and mass amounts of data—e.g., understanding your customer and showing them something that would get their attention.

Truer than trial and error, cognitive computing gives you a simulated estimate of the feedback from your audience. This serves your business two-fold.

Firstly, you can have an idea of what you can expect from your customers before the launch. [This is different than what we talked about in part 2; here, we are talking about after the design is completed, but before the campaign is actually unveiled.] By gauging your customer response prior to the actual campaign launch, you can set realistic goals and benchmarks.

Holding your campaign to unrealistically high KPIs will just bum you out, even if the results are positive. Adversely, unrealistically low KPIs will make you pessimistic and quite possibility kill your campaign before it even hits the ground. It’s all about perception when it comes to your goals, and, in this case, foresight will make you more accurate and potentially happier.

Secondly, when you campaign is completed, you can compare the estimated metrics against the actual metrics for a post-mortem on your completed campaign. Since your expectations were realistic, you can ask yourself, did the results match? Was there a higher response from an unexpected market or audience? Did you overspend or underspend where it really would have made a difference?

This follow-up is essential to moving forward with your marketing mindset. Seeing your KPIs compared against your now-logical goals allows you to rework what you learned into your next advertising campaign. You can finally gain that competitive edge… on yourself.

Don’t miss out on:

Part 1: Your Campaign Worked… But How Do You Know Which Part?

Part 2: Stimulate Your Creative Process