A guide to effective campaign evaluation

Marketing campaigns are expensive. Considerable planning goes into designing the message, developing the best creative content and deciding what media and channels to use. After all that time and money, it is important to monitor your marketing and understand if your campaign has been a success.

But how do you track effectiveness of your marketing campaign?

Campaign evaluation research is an important first step in understanding if the campaign is working as expected. Different campaigns can be designed to work in quite different ways – sometimes we are looking to share new information about a brand or product, other campaigns are designed to make you feel different about the brand, there again others will just make you aware of brand that you might not otherwise think of and of course some are simply designed to generate sales and nothing else.

All successful campaigns ultimately should lead to increased sales but the path to achieving those sales can be tortuous and sometimes it is unclear why the sales have occurred.

Campaign evaluation research provides a stepping stone to help this understanding. Typically campaign research involves two or more matched waves of research that compare knowledge and perceptions of a brand before the campaign, with those perceptions after the campaign. By taking matched samples of consumers (who fit the target audience) and asking similar questions – we can see whether there has been real change – and can start to ascribe this affect to the campaign.

To add insight we then ask detailed questions about the campaign itself – have consumers seen it, do they know who it is for, do they understand the message, was it engaging. Forensic analysis of this response in the context of the brand changes we have seen can help us draw conclusions about whether the campaign is working, and how it is working.

And most importantly what lessons we can take to help us improve the next round of communication.

As pioneers in brand research, get in touch to find out more about how we can help achieve your campaign evaluation goals at hello@the-nursery.net

The Nursery’s expertise covers the full range of the planning cycle from Market Understanding, Segmentation, Proposition Development, Creative Development, Campaign Evaluation and brand and experience Tracking.