7.5 Tips and Tricks To Improve Marketing Campaign Performance by 10X

Today, everyone is looking for improved performance in their marketing campaigns. CEOs are pushing CMOs to produce better results, and CMOs are challenging their campaign teams to increase leads, sales opportunities and revenue generated from all their marketing campaigns.

But that’s easier said than done.

It’s harder than ever for marketers to cut through the clutter, prospects are inundated with marketing outreach and the tools are getting better at keeping unwanted messages from your prospects.

However, there are some ways to stack the deck in your favor and improve performance. Here are 7.5 of the best tips and tricks our campaign team uses to drive results for clients.

Tip 1 – Increase Personalization

As part of Adobe’s latest personalization report, 1,770 global decision-makers were asked about the impact of their personalization initiatives.

68% of respondents said that initiatives had exceeded targets and expectations for revenue, while 67% said they’d exceeded targets and expectations for both customer experience measures and conversion rates. See the full report.

It’s a fact that campaign personalization works. People don’t want to be part of a one-to-many campaign; they want to be part of one-to-one outreach. But marketing has to scale, which means marketers must use personalization to make it seem like mass marketing campaigns are one-to-one outreach.

The technology tools available to marketers make this possible, but it takes some strategy and planning.

First, let’s be clear that personalization does not mean Dear Mike. It means the content of the outreach is about my role, my company, my industry and my specific challenges.

It means the solutions and stories are about people like me at companies like mine with challenges like mine.

This is all doable if you take the time to map out each prospect’s buyer journey, understand their specific challenges and create stories and content designed specifically to get them engaged in a conversation with you.

Just look at your inbox or social feeds. How much of that outreach is personalized to the level we’re advising here? No need to answer that – I already know the answer is almost none of it.

Tip 2 – Tell a Better Story

When most company leaders think about campaigns, they first think about what products or services they’re going to promote. That’s a good place to start, but then you should quickly shift to what stories to tell around the challenges your prospects have with these products or services.

You want your campaigns to start with your prospects, not with your stuff.

In our case, we offer marketing strategy, lead generation, sales talent, sales training and MarTech/sales tech services, but our campaigns lead with the challenges associated with scaling, predicting and repeating revenue generation every month.

In addition, you have to tell your prospects something that no one else is telling them. You must work hard to be remarkable in your niche. Again, people offer those services I mentioned above, but no one combines them into a revenue generation system.

No one has systematized all four of those deliverables into a single stream that delivers predictable, scalable and repeatable revenue growth.

Before you start building your specific campaign tactics and the details around campaign execution, make sure you have an emotional, compelling and potentially disruptive story to tell.

Tip 3 – Make the Campaign Omnichannel

I often see marketing campaigns that are single channel, like email campaigns or paid search campaigns. Instead, consider multichannel or omnichannel campaigns that tell the same story through a variety of channels.

Here’s an example:

• Use Google paid search ads that focus on a specific vertical with a vertically focused offer to a landing page designed for that vertical.
  
  
• Run similar ads on social media across multiple platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube and Meta with similar vertically focused content, offers and stories that drive people back to a related page on your website.
  
  
• Create a website page with rich content supporting the stories and offers in the ads.
  
  
• Email out that story to the same audience, pushing to the same or a similar landing page.
  
  
• Run retargeting ads for people who land on the page but don’t convert, offering additional vertically targeted content to help get them back to that specific page and drive the conversion.
  
  
• Nurture all the conversions with ongoing email content, working them through their buyer journey with a variety of role-based, vertically focused and pain-centric offers until they finally ask to talk with a sales rep.

I think you get the idea. Yes, this is a bigger lift and more complex, but this is how you improve the performance of your marketing campaigns.

Tip 4 – Improve the Segmentation on Your List

To do what I’m advising in the section above, you need a database that is correctly segmented as well as rich in first-party prospect data and a platform that allows you to create highly segmented lists for your marketing campaigns.

In most cases, this means enriching your current prospect database with enough information about your individual contacts and the specific companies they work for to deliver the highly personalized campaigns and prospect experiences that I talked about above.

HubSpot is one of the preferred platforms that provides additional information to supplement your existing database through its native integration with Clearbit.

Tip 5 – Offer Early Buyer Journey Content Instead of Late-Stage Content

Another challenge we see often when it comes to campaigns is designing the campaign around the late-stage offer first. This is a little like asking your date to marry you after your first cup of coffee.

In most cases, this campaign might be your prospect’s first introduction to you and your company’s products or services, but you went right in for the kill and asked to schedule the demo, do an assessment or have a consultation.

Instead, start your initial outreach campaigns with early buyer journey offers like educational e-books, tip guides, templates, infographics and videos. Just ask for their email address, because the less you ask for, the more conversions you’ll get and the better your campaigns will perform.

Be prepared to nurture those new leads and continue to progressively ask for additional information. As they get more comfortable with you and your company, the rest of the information you need will come in naturally.

If you do this nurture motion correctly, you can get them to signal where they are in the buyer journey and when they’re ready for sales to reach out.

Tip 6 – Improve Your Data, Analytics and Insights

Despite what most agencies will tell you, almost every campaign starts slowly and gains momentum over time. Part of why this happens is because even the best agencies and campaign managers have to prove out their expectations around creative, copy, offers, targeting criteria, timing, messaging and more.

This makes the data and the analytics associated with campaign management critical to success. You need detailed data on all your campaigns.

But more importantly, you need someone who can look at the data and uncover the insights buried in that data, so those insights inform your action plan going forward.

Uncovering insights is challenging, and unless you’ve put in your 10,000 hours, it’s hard to know what the data is telling you, how to slice the data to uncover more insights and how to act on what you do uncover.

This is where an experienced campaign team can be worth its weight in gold. More on that in the final tip in this article.

Tip 7 – Increase the Cycles for Optimization

After you uncover your insights and create your action plan, you need the methodology to cycle your campaigns early and often to drive successful results.

This methodology requires some art and some science. The art comes around the timing. Most campaigns are using platform algorithms to drive optimization – Google for search and retargeting, and Meta and LinkedIn for native advertising. If you mess with these too early, they won’t have time to learn and improve performance.

This might mean making only small adjustments during the first 30 days and, if you make more significant changes, giving those platforms time again to optimize. This balance takes experience.

The science part comes into play when knowing what levers to pull and when to pull them. When do you change offers? When do you scrap creative or shift to backup messaging? Sometimes it can be difficult to know, while other times it might be obvious.

What you should never do is make too many changes at once. If performance improves, you won’t know exactly what led to that improved performance. There will be too many new variables. Instead, try to change one component at a time, maybe two. The better you are at this, the more you’ll learn and the faster you’ll be equipped to make your next campaign even better.

Tip 7.5 – Work With an Experienced Campaign Team

Finally, the extra tip is to work with a team of experienced campaign professionals. This is going to save you time and money while getting you to your goals faster. The right team should also be able to educate you and your team on what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it.

They can teach you what goes into solid campaign planning, how to set it up in your marketing automation technology, how to align sales around the campaign, how to track campaign performance and how to optimize it over time.

But the best reason to do this is the simple business case that you’ll get better results faster. You’ll have more ammunition to do more campaigns going forward and the company will benefit from these results sooner.

An experienced campaign team should be up and running with leads coming in just 30 days at the most and as early as two weeks. In our experience, internal and less experienced teams could take as long as three months to get these campaigns running.

Sometimes it’s better to bring in experts, especially when you’re doing something complex or for the first time.

Getting your campaigns to perform should be a high priority through the end of the year. These tips and tricks are proven to improve performance.