| Campaign Evaluation There
are a multitude of methods to evaluate your marketing and promotional
activity, ranging from the sophisticated to very
simple and low cost. Here is a brief summary of what campaign
evaluation involves.
Campaign evaluation and market
research are closely linked and
should form an integral part of any communications campaign.
Once your campaign has been developed,
evaluation is about measuring in an objective way, whether or
not your campaign has been successful.
For
your evaluation to have any real meaning, your objectives must
have
been measurable to begin with. Don’t try and
evaluate other factors or objectives that someone thinks about
once the campaign is live. This just muddies the waters. For
example; a campaign objective could be as simple as “to
increase Christmas Panto ticket sales by 5%”.
Finding
out how well the campaign has performed against
predefined objectives
usually involves:
- Quantitative
audience research to take robust measurements of
spontaneous awareness of the campaign and media used
-
Prompted awareness and recognition of the campaign.
-
Knowledge and behaviour relating to the campaign messages. This
is desirable
but by no means essential.
- Analysis of ticket sales, cups of tea sold or merchandise
sold from your shop.
For PR-based campaigns that are not easy to determine
measurable audience research, it can be useful to conduct
media evaluation.
This can provide an objective measure of the extent
to which your desired (and other) messages are reported
on in the media – and
provides a far more sophisticated analysis than a measure
of column inches. This is an area that is still in
development and
there are all sorts of fascinating as well as absurd
methods being touted by some consultants.
You may need to explain to your director that campaign evaluation
cannot be seen in isolation and cannot just be the responsibility
of the marketing and communications teams.
Take
the sales of merchandise in your shop: there would all sorts
of contributing
factors as to what exactly has been the motivation to
purchase. If the campaign has not been reflected in your merchandising,
or the staff has not been briefed and customer
service is bad,
this will undoubtedly have a negative impact on sales
and a corresponding impact on marketing money well spent. Of course you must not forget about the brand during evaluation,
as perceptions and development will be intricately linked in
the consumers mind.
This is just the tip of the iceberg and soon we'll be looking
at some new evaluation techniques, seeing
how
to
make PR
evaluation
more than just a measurement in “advertising
column inches” as well as bringing you some case studies.
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Mary
Tebje
|
