A lack of adequate planning and campaign strategy can result in campaign failure even before your campaign has been launched. And with budgets crimping, measured ROI is now more crucial for marketing than ever.

Build it and they will come

The satisfaction of building and creating a beautiful creative campaign is often offset by a lack of measurable results. And a beautiful creative, while distinctly pleasing to the eye, will not encourage buy-in from senior management. The key to a successful marketing campaign lies solely in the planning and strategy of your campaign functionality and channels, ensuring that, should you build a big beautiful castle in the sky, consumers will actually come and see it.

68% of B2B organisation don’t know their sales funnel

MarketingSherpa reports that 68% of B2B organisations have not identified their sales funnels and don’t understand the consumer behaviour that results in sales. Not knowing what to measure for your campaign success can result in you not knowing what channels to include in your marketing campaign – leaving you with no ROI to show for your efforts other than direct sales. Consumers are no longer isolated islands that can be influenced by one channel alone. Even should your conversion platform be in-store, online marketing should be utilised to promote the campaign and bring attention to your product or service. Planning your campaign mechanic should be in line with your sales funnel and consumer behaviour, it should not be led by campaign execution or creative.

65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing[i]

How to determine which channels to include in your campaign. The Annuitas Group shows that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, showing that ROI includes many more elements than a simple sales conversion. By carefully planning your campaign channels you can ensure that lead capture is included in every marketing channel and that there are more metrics being measured than a simple sale. The collection of email addresses, telephone numbers, personal data such as age and gender – all of this can assist you in understanding your customer, their preferences and how to take them down the sales funnel.

61% of global Internet users research products online[ii]

No marketing campaign is complete without the necessary media backing to send targeted traffic through the selected channels. While many creative ideas have the potential to go viral and generate organic traffic by itself, most (if not all) viral marketing campaigns are backed by paid funding or media to reach the appropriate audience and volumes. Whether through celebrity endorsement or paid media budgets, your carefully selected channels need to be boosted to ensure the necessary reach and traffic for your campaign so you can generate the sales and sales leads required for a good ROI.

Digital Fire is a digital marketing company that provides all online services for a fully integrated marketing campaign. For more information please contact Nikki Ingwerson at nikki@digitalfire.co.za.