How to Do Quarterly Ad Planning

Perhaps you have a yearly marketing plan that provides an overview of the year. This can be helpful in understanding your overall goals but too vague to implement. That’s why a campaign plan with a narrower window—such as a quarter—is essential to marketing success.

A quarterly ad campaign plan provides a more granular view of your objectives, goals, and success. This will enable you to keep your priorities in line and respond accordingly to KPIs and metrics as results become available.

This in-depth guide provides actionable tips for successfully planning your quarterly ad campaign. By the end of this article, you will feel confident in your ability to create a thorough campaign plan you and your team can execute.

Review Last Quarter’s KPI and Metrics

The first step to future campaign planning is to look at the previous quarter’s performance. Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics, you can gain a deeper understanding of the success of previous campaigns.

The KPIs can vary depending on the marketing campaign and its ultimate purpose, but a few KPIs to consider closely are:

customer acquisition cost (CAC)
customer lifetime value (LTV)
return on investment (ROI)
marketing qualified lead (MQL)
traffic-to-lead ratio (new contact rate)
lead-to-customer ratio
return on ad spend (ROAS)
conversion rate
website traffic
customer retention

This list is a healthy mix of short-term and long-term KPIs, which is crucial to agile marketing. You don’t need to include all of them in your quarterly business review. Instead, you should focus on one or two that most closely align with each of your objectives.

When choosing KPIs to track, ask yourself whether it is easily quantifiable and something you can influence. The more control you have over a KPI, the more valuable its inclusion in your performance tracking.

With the information above, you can make new quarterly campaign decisions based on what worked, what didn’t, and what ideas could have been better executed.

Set Campaign Goals and Metrics to Track

It’s not enough to create a plan. You should do so with specific goals in mind. However, setting marketing goals you can achieve requires an in-depth approach. I recommend the SMART method for goal setting. This stands for:

specific
measurable
achievable
relevant
timebound

What does this look like for a marketing campaign?

Let’s say you’re running a campaign with the overall goal of bringing more qualified leads into your funnel. A SMART goal might look like this:

“Increase the number of MQL’s in our funnel by 8 percent by the end of Q3 via a targeted social media campaign.”

This goal hits all of the marks of a SMART goal by being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound. By the end of the campaign, you can easily answer yes or no on whether the goal was achieved. If not, you can reevaluate for the next quarter.

Evaluate Campaign Targeting

Your ad campaigns will only be as effective as the audience they reach. Identifying your target market is a crucial step in ensuring a successful quarterly campaign season.

You should first take a closer look at …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog