You should do a post mortem analysis on your marketing campaigns. Why? So you can lather, rinse, and repeat when things go remarkably well. And, so you can analyse what may have gone wrong when things don’t go so well.
Whether it’s a new website, a new blog, a product launch, or a new niche that you’re getting into, things may not always go exactly as planned.
But, if you have a proven marketing strategy that has already worked for a past campaigns, you can often apply those principles to your new campaign. And, if things don’t go well, you’ll soon be able to learn how to analyse why.
Marketing Campaign Example
A five-page website is built. Five main keyword phrases are targeted. Each of those five pages is focused on one of those keywords with titles, meta tags, image tags, and headlines that use those keywords.
Then, for each of those five pages, an article is written that deals with the keyword and points back to that page. The articles are changed a little and submitted to directories for syndication so now there are keyword anchor text links pointing back to that website.
A blog is added to the site and updated twice a week, utilising keywords and phrases, photos, and social marketing. Each blog entry points to at least one other page on the site and often points to authority sites as well. Social marketing accounts are created and points visitors back to the site, site’s sub-pages, and to articles and blogs written about that site. A modest pay per click campaign is also created to drive interested traffic that searches for a keyword phrase or two.
Suddenly, you find you have a fantastic marketing campaign as traffic and sales start to pour in.
Using The Analysis For Future Marketing Campaigns
Now that you’ve seen how successful that has gone, you can take that marketing strategy and use it for another site. If something hasn’t gone right, you can break things down and analyse various aspects of your campaign so that you can tweak and improve the next one.
Things to look at could include:
• Did you choose good keywords?
• Did you apply good keyword optimisation?
• What did people do once they landed on the page. Was there something that could have helped them click through further or subscribed or commented?
• How did search engines react? Did they index those pages? If not, what did the competition for those keywords have that your site might not have had?
A lot of things could happen. High conversion, low traffic. High traffic, low conversion. Analysing your conversion rate and doing some split testing could help you when things don’t go as well as you had hoped. And when they do go quite well, you’ve now got a proven success formula that could be repeated.
Things change at warp speed online and with SEO, but when you find something that works, it’s a good idea to do your best to capitalise on it. If you find your formula doesn’t work or suddenly stops working, all your analysing and efforts can still pay off in terms of helping you as your experience will probably allow you to be able to quickly determine where to make changes for increased success.
Good or bad, performing a post mortem analysis on your marketing campaigns will help you increase your internet marketing knowledge and potential for future success.
About Sean Rasmussen
There’s a lot to think about, isn’t there… But it’s all about the tweaking, testing, learning, to hit the nail on the head. It’s very unlikely you’re going to get it right first time round.
I believe that the golden rule for a successful marketing campaign is to review, change and adapt. There is no point in wasting money on ineffective PPC campaign’s or advertising that is not actually converting.
And if its not broken, don’t fix it.
You have just pointed out one of the most difficult things about this business for me. I know that I should be patient and do all the things that you advise – keywords, meta, tags, headlines, anchor text links, write and submit articles that relate, add a blog to the site and update it twice a week and on and on.
I know that if I really take your advice and do all these things thoroughly and be happy with working on one site only until it is truly saturated with good things I would be much further along.
It is so tempting to have a new idea and start another project before really doing everything possible to make the current one terrific.
Thanks for the wake up. I will try to be better and more thorough. I will try to keep reviewing and conducting post mortems so that I really get it streamlined rather than just functional.
As in every business that is very good advice. You need to analyze which of the things you did worked and which didn’t, otherwise you will not learn from your mistakes as you might not even realize they were mistakes.
I really like your Marketing Campaign example, because it gives the basics of what you can and need to do online to sell a product (online or offline). I guess I have to speed up my writing process, still too slow
Hi Sean,
I love your idea of a marketing campaign. It seems so simple when you put it like that. When you say you build a five page website; what if your website is a blog? How can you add a blog to a blog? Or, do you just make the second blog about a different aspect of your niche?
I like the idea of doing a post mortem because it’s important to learn from the experience whether it was good or bad. You have to keep moving forward so even if you got it wrong; at least that’s one thing you won’t have to try next time.
It would be a new website Jazz, with 5 pages relative to your new marketing campaign. You can also add a blog to that website as mentioned in the article.
I don’t know what happened then as I read this post, Sean, it’s like my brain reorganized itself so that the process of creating a site for internet marketing is now clear. Along with your Post Mortem Analysis For Marketing Campaigns you provided a perfect summary of a Marketing Campaign Example. that makes it all so clear. I didn’t realize it wasn’t clear before.
Thanks this is very relevant to what I have been doing in the past few months!
I have learnt and attempted to use a similar marketing campaign to what you have described in this blog but have not had results as good as I had hoped. After reading this post it is obvious that a post mortem analysis will help me to identify where I am going wrong and allow me to calculate the correct actions to take in order to get better results.
Glad the article was beneficial Jeremy
Hi Sean
I like the way you have mapped out the marketing campaign in a simplified way (well, you make it look easy).
I can see how it is necessary to do an analysis on a successful marketing strategy and then repeat it on the next campaign – brilliant!. Once we have that template for success we can then keep duplicating it. Now that’s smart thinking. Thank you for this great information. Another one to book mark.
You should always conduct a post mortem analysis for you marketing campaigns. It is the only way to determine what you were doing right or wrong. Once you see the results it’s time to make the hard decisions on what you may need to slash, modify, use elsewhere, etc.
One thing that I also like about this article is the concise steps for setting up a campaign as illustrated in the Marketing Campaign Example. This is a very good overview of the key steps in implementing a campaign. Well worth making a note of.