As the saying often attributed to Einstein goes, doing the same thing and expecting different results is a sign of madness.
Who could disagree with this notion? Yet, day in, and day out, we often see marketers, advertisers and even agencies do this very thing.
It’s even worse when people keep doing the same thing time and again and don’t even know what the outcome is, they just hope for the best.
‘Not us, we don’t do that’, we hear you say. But can you honestly say that you evaluate the outcome of every campaign you execute, even the quick and dirty ones? That you know the ROI on every piece of work you do? We can’t and we are obsessed with monitoring, evaluating and knowing what has worked and what hasn’t worked when it comes to media planning and buying.
How many times have you said to yourself, ‘We’ve had lots of positive feedback about the campaign and the boss’s other half said they have seen it too, so it must have worked’?
How many times have you said, ‘Well, the campaign wasn’t a disaster and nothing went wrong, so let’s just stay calm and carry on’?
How many times has a campaign failed to move the dial but you’ve said ‘This work looked good so let’s enter it into an award’?
There will be people who have asked colleagues and stakeholders to trust them on a gut feeling that something will work. If we’re all being honest, we’ve all done it.
The reality is, if you want great results, you have to deliver outstanding work. You need to be able to prove the impact of your work and you need to be able to evidence it to your boss, a stakeholder, the board, a partner, or, in our case, the client.
It means marketers need to invest time and money in really understanding their brief. They need to understand the problems that they are looking to solve and how are they going to measure whether they have achieved their goal or, at the very least, got closer to it.
Evaluating and scoring campaigns shouldn’t be an afterthought and there’s no point in setting campaign goals that can’t be measured. After all, if you don’t know how something will be measured and evaluated, how will you know if you’ve achieved your goal or not?
We talk with our clients a lot about real-time measuring and scoring, whether this is done through online dashboards or pre, mid and post-campaign polling because it gives us the ability to turn the tap on if something is working well and dialling down activity if it’s not performing as we’d expected.
In summary, measuring your campaign's effectiveness and impact, as you go along, will ensure that you can focus on the things within your media mix that are delivering results and in the long term, this approach will save you money. Evaluation shouldn’t be something that happens solely at the end of a campaign.
Don’t be that person who keeps doing the same things and expects different results. Be the marketer that can consistently drive campaigns and constantly deliver results. Measure as you go.
Don’t hope for the best. Be the best!
If you want to be the marketer that can consistently drive campaigns and constantly deliver results, say Hello today.
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