What is Successful Marketing?

How do you reach meaningful success in your marketing?

A strange question was asked of me in a recent phone conversation, and I think it was an important topic for us all to consider. What makes up a successful marketing campaign? The exact way they phrased it was “how do you determine a successful marketing campaign?” Which without a few nuances is the same question, but more personally focused. As enamored as I was for my personal opinion, I think the real answer is less subjective.

The answer lies in one clear piece of information, the data.

First, The Question in the Question

The question I think the person was asking in a nice way, was “how will we know if this is working”. In that we have two questions. First we have the “this” or the tactical aspects of marketing activity, and the “works” as in the results that come from the tactic. A more direct approach might have stated, “what results do you expect from X activity”. All good questions, all basically the same question.

Yet, the answer is a bit more complex.

Success is Possible, If It Is Measurable.

The problem with many “failed” marketing and advertising activities, is that a goal or metric has not been established in which to hold the activity measurable. You might be sending emails, but have no clue if your open rate is successful because you don’t have a benchmark to work against, or you don’t know what aspect of the activity to measure, or have never measured it consecutively.

The point being, you won’t be able to judge growth or success unless you first have measurement in place. That goes for marketing and sales activity, as well as any detail of your business that you want to be successful.

The Recipe for Success

I’m not one to be overly theoretical. But a universal definition of success is going to be a bit elusive for every organization. One of our client sends emails without any trouble twice a month, whereas another can barely get one a quarter. Success in each case is different.

But there are some commonalties on how we can define and create a recipe for success.

1. Measure what we know already to be. Putting measurements in place is the first step in understanding what is happening now and what the current level of activity and results might be. Without this, we can not improve (since success for most people is improving something) what we are doing.


2. Change activity. The simplest part of this entire process is to change activity. Start doing something new, do it differently, or stop doing it and see how that changes what you are measuring.


3. Measure the outcomes from those changes. Once you have those measurements in place, and can see if your changes impacted anything you’re starting the process of success, and you are now able to focus on the changes that give you the most improvement.

The Importance of Benchmarks

There is one big addition to this equation that you must take into place. There is a starting ground for most marketing activity, and we call those benchmarks. For example, Google says that you should have at least a 1% CTR on your Adwords ads to be successful. This is a benchmark. If you are not getting that, your campaign is not successful, and you need to keep working.

There are many other benchmarks in the industry as well.

• Email Benchmarks


• Social Benchmarks


• PPC Benchmarks

All of these are great places to start to help you understand if you are in a successful place to begin, and what ultimate success would mean.

Benchmark Success Vs Business Success

The next progression you’ll encounter is that you might achieve benchmark success, but still not have business success. This happens frequently. Benchmarks are not very high in the real world for professional marketing. You might get a 1.1% CTR in Adwords on your own, but we focus on getting 4-5% CTR on Adwords campaigns that we run as our personal benchmark. For us, that second level is success.

That is the step that you need a professional to help you with. If you are just starting out, you might muster up some results and more power to you. But when you start wanting to get more out of your activity, you need to work with companies that can get higher results from activities, not just have experience with the activities. Make sense?

Source: B2C