Getting Actionable Insights from a Campaign Post-Mortem

Getting Actionable Insights from a Campaign Post-Mortem

October 22, 2019 - by Jason Kamara

Popular TV shows like Dexter, CSI (pick your flavour) and Netflix’s Mindhunter, feature forensic experts skillfully using high-tech tools and deductive reasoning to identify the cause of death or pathology of a criminal. A coroner conducting hundreds of post-mortems is adept at using forensic science to ascertain causes of death from minute details that would have gone unnoticed by the layperson. These same skills are becoming increasingly relevant in the field of inbound marketing. As marketers, we have powerful tools at our disposal and the ability to systematically evaluate the success and failure of different marketing activities.

When evaluating the performance of a given marketing campaign, these assets can be employed in much the same manner as a coroner conducting a post-mortem. The findings yielded can be used to improve the performance of future campaigns and close the loop between marketing and sales when attributing the value of campaign activities. Whether it’s a seasonal ecommerce campaign, webinar, tradeshow or social media contest, a campaign post-mortem can highlight issues with audience targeting, messaging, platform selection, budget, lead follow up and a host of other factors impacting overall success. Regardless of the type of campaign there are 7 key ingredients that will help you conduct a post-mortem that is revealing and actionable.

7 Ingredients for a Successful Campaign Post-Mortem

1 – Develop SMART Goals

Develop a campaign plan with SMART goals and share it with marketing, sales and any other relevant stakeholders. This will provide for greater visibility and buy-in, and allows you to elicit useful feedback for campaign development.

2 – Identify Multiple KPIs & Microconversions

Break down the quantifiable metrics or microconversions required to reach your targets. If you have a campaign goal of 20 sales qualified leads, how many marketing qualified leads will that require? How many contacts? You can take it a step further and define target conversion rates for different landing pages, a target cost per lead or weekly number of meetings created for sales reps.

3 – Include Resourcing, Budget & Timelines

Add resourcing, budget and timelines to the campaign plan. If you have access to fewer resources and less budget than anticipated that should be taken into account when evaluating performance in the post-mortem. It can also be useful to compare the return on investment for different activities rather than focusing purely on absolute numbers.

4 – Ensure All Tracking is Properly Configured

Ensure that all UTM codes, lead tracking, source and interaction tracking is working. It can be disappointing (and embarrassing) to present your post-mortem findings to internal stakeholders when critical data is missing. You can thoroughly test all your forms in advance, use Google Analytics real-time reporting and other methods to check data in advance and once the campaign has launched.

5 – Develop a Repeatable Process

Develop a systematic and repeatable campaign post-mortem process. If you’re doing this for the first time, a simple spreadsheet could be sufficient. If you’re running a multi-faceted campaign with a high degree of complexity, you could combine all your findings in a slide deck for presentation purposes and keep your granular results in more technical spreadsheets, dashboards and reports. Whatever process you use, it will save time in the future to make it repeatable.

6 – Put Time into your Presentation

If you will be sharing your findings (and you should), make sure your presentation is clear and insightful. Identifying which data sources to use and how to present the data will set you up for success. Knowing your audience, what KPIs they value most and what level of detail to go into are key components of a winning presentation. I’ve found sharing in a group setting to be far more productive than simply emailing around a PDF/slide deck. If you are able to share in a group setting, encourage discussion and take notes. This is a great time to get feedback from your sales team. They can help you evaluate messaging that did or did not resonate with prospects, the quality of leads from different channels and provide other qualitative feedback they may have.

7 – Don’t Forget to Consult Post-Mortems before Planning New Campaigns

Get in the habit of organizing your post-mortems and consulting them before developing any future campaigns. If you are in the small business B2B space for example, you may be tasked with developing Black Friday campaigns each year. This is a perfect use-case for conducting post-mortems. The insights yielded can help you decrease wasted ad spend, shorten sales follow up time and increase average purchase amount for your upcoming campaigns. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Some of the most successful campaigns come from identifying the most productive marketing activities and continuously optimizing based on quantitative and qualitative data.

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