How do we define effective?
As marketers, we need to have the answers to many questions. A big question that we often answer is, how effective are my marketing campaigns?
To get a clear picture of how effective a marketing campaign is, we need to consider these three questions:
- What is the definition of effective?
- What do effective campaigns look like?
- What are the attributes of a campaign that make it effective?
A quick Google search defined “effective” to mean, successful in producing a desired or intended result. The desired result of a marketing campaign is more closed-won opportunities. So, an effective marketing campaign must play a role in winning new opportunities.
Now that we have defined what effective means in terms of marketing campaigns, we want to look at what do effective campaigns look like and what makes them effective.
We answer these questions with sales and marketing data that we aggregated and anonymized from many business-to-business software companies using Optimized Sales & Marketing.
What does an effective campaign look like?
As we defined above, an effective campaign plays a role in winning new opportunities. Let’s call a campaign that wins at least one opportunity a successful campaign and those that do not, unsuccessful.
Now that we have a classification of successful vs unsuccessful campaigns, let’s see what that means for our pipeline.
Do successful campaigns drive more pipeline?
Yes!
You can see below that a successful campaign creates 8X the opportunities than an unsuccessful campaign.
Sounds great! Just run successful campaigns and all your pipeline generation problems will be over! Not as easy as it sounds. What do these successful campaigns look like and how can I achieve more of them? More activities and leads!
What do I mean when I say more activities and leads? I mean that your campaigns need more of them.
We found that a campaign’s probability of success drastically increased as the activities and leads increased, which is displayed below.
These graphs assist in giving a more concrete answer to how many activities and leads I should have on a campaign.
Once you hit 50 activities, the odds of you having a successful program are almost guaranteed.
Similarly, on how many leads you should have, the probability increases as you add more.
I do want to note, the activities I am talking about are not any activities. I am talking about activities that truly get your leads engaged. This ranges from downloading whitepapers to attending webinars to meeting at a tradeshow – things you typically think of as Positive Responses. These activities drive engagement!
How effective are my marketing campaigns?
A campaign’s purpose is to play a role in winning opportunities, but how effective are our campaigns at doing that? Using the dataset comprised of industry-leading B2B marketing organizations, we were able to look at the wins per campaign and found that the average wins per campaign was just above one. This is impacted by the fact that some companies within the dataset run A LOT of campaigns. This begs the question if I run more campaigns will I see more wins? Definitely! But how will it impact the effectiveness of your campaign?
We created a curve to help answer that question! The curve compares the dataset’s marketing organizations on how many wins per campaign they were seeing as they increased the total number of campaigns that they ran. We know that wins per campaign are a sufficient way of measuring the effectiveness of a campaign.
Wins per campaign drop as you increase the total number of campaigns. This gives us more understanding that as you increase the number of campaigns, you may not see as many wins per campaign. But that is okay! This curve allows you to measure your marketing organization against a group of industry-leading companies on how many wins per campaign they are seeing. If you are above the curve, then you are in a good spot. On the other hand, if you fall below, you need to look into adding more activities and leads to your campaigns!
Where do you fall on the curve?
