Why marketing, technology and data are inseparable for a successful campaign

By Ambika Sharma Campaigns, more specifically online campaign, have caught the fancy of the world around. From established political parties to novice artists and young startups, everyone is engaging in campaigns over social media and otherwise. The motivation behind the same is equally as varied. While political parties may wish to engage with more users, propagate their message and ideologies, an artist might just be looking for a bigger exposure and a startup to boost its subscriptions or promote its product or service. Regardless of the motivation, one facet holds true when it comes to campaigns, they promise and increase in numbers. That single piece of information is available to everyone. And yet we have certain organisation excel at their online campaign, while others more or less, end up burning resources to no avail. After studying various campaigns, both successful and failures, we have come to identify certain factors common in the ones that tasted success. A the cost of spilling beans too fast too soon, the campaigns emerging to be truly victorious displayed the best combination of marketing, technology and faultlessly collected data. Let us go through the different stages of campaign management and figure out how the combination of these 3 unique factors contributes towards the undisputed success of campaigns. Planning: Let the sparks fly Generating the idea for the campaign, is part instinct and part the knowledge received from the books of marketing, or relevant experience for that matter. Data plays a key role as it organises the pain points and motives of the audiences. In fact, a lot of time, just be looking at an available data, for instance Google Analytics for the blog, would reveal the ways in which users are truly connecting to your service offering, giving you enough prompts to design a dedicated campaign. While in the planning stage, also make sure to assign a particular budget and design a landing page, specifically for the campaign. Various collaborations and cost management tools will come to your rescue, letting different teams work on the same campaign idea and decide costs for the same. Execution: Getting the work done It is show time and how you are going to go about executing the campaign you decided for, will make all the difference. Have you planned a digital campaign or have coupled it with physical touch points as well? How are you going to disseminate the same? While the knowledge of marketing will enable you to understand which channel is the best, refer the data and figure out where exactly your strengths lie. Also, deploy technology and embrace social media to better promote the campaign. Are you planning on writing a blog post about the campaign? While the campaigns would die with time, the blog posts will remain archived forever, hence bringing about the element of longevity. Depending on the assigned budget, you may opt for paid promotions, partner with other service providers specialising in promotional technologies such as, social video sharing platforms, enterprise messaging solution, email and web marketing etc. Again, the stronger the technical expertise of the organisation, the better you will be at promoting the campaign. Analysing: What works for you? It is important to measure the success of marketing campaign, as against to the initial objectives. Have you gained the traction you were looking at in the beginning? How has your subscription list increased? Did the traffic you were hosting on the website increased, and how? Did you end you getting more followers on Twitter and Instagram, had more users liked you on Facebook? Efficient hold on the technology will help you track better. Certain organisations have developed their own email marketing campaign managers, after realising that emailers and newsletters are really working for them. While a lot of information can be extracted from social media, especially if you know the technical ways of extracting the same, pay close attention also to Google Analytics, studying the referral traffic and searched queries. Organise this data accordingly, as that would go on define and lay the pavement for similar marketing campaigns in future. In essence, go big or go home! Following the digital boom in the present day, there is no scope for a half-hearted attempt. Deploy the best of technology, available data and marketing expertise to give the much required edge to your business. Promising better web penetration, deeper social media engagement and better traction, the importance of managing and executing successful campaign cannot be overstated. The author is Founder, Pulp Strategy