Measuring the success of a marketing campaign can be a challenging task. There are many ways to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of a campaign, but not all metrics work across the board. Success means different things to different companies, and it ultimately depends on the intended audience.
Emily Negrin, vice president of corporate affairs at Inari, says that the greatest accomplishment of a successful marketing campaign is when the message resonates with the audience.
“There’s lots of ways to evaluate ROI, but hands down to me, the greatest accomplishment is when I hear somebody from my audience repeat a message to me; then I know it resonated. They appreciated it and they understood it,” she says.
Kevin Leigh Smith, senior lecturer and advisor from Purdue University, believes that storytelling is an essential component of successful content marketing.
“As someone who is out there producing content or more specifically, teaching the content, I think what I really like the most is telling the stories of people who are involved in the business or the company or whatever it happens to be,” he says.
However, content marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Different forms of content marketing work differently on different audiences, and what works for one company may not work for another. Smith advises companies to start by understanding their audience and what they want and need.
“The second part I look at is what are our strengths. What do we do well? Then you kind of do a comparison on what we do well with what the audience wants,” he adds.
Knowing your audience is essential to building a successful marketing message. While content marketing may look different for different brands, the end goal is the same: success. It is important to define what success means for your company and to evaluate the ROI using metrics that are relevant to your specific audience.
In the end, the success of a marketing campaign ultimately depends on whether the message resonates with the intended audience.
As Negrin says, “We know we did what we needed to do when my audience is now talking about that content and repeating some of the messages we wanted them to take away.”
