The Whispr Group Insights Blog often highlights the benefits of continuous analysis and optimisation of marketing campaigns after launch – and rightly so – but there’s another secret weapon in the insights toolkit. A pre-campaign analysis can make a huge difference to positioning your campaign for success, avoiding costly mistakes and making sure you’re talking to the right people via the right platforms and brand ambassadors. Here's the details.
Key learnings: Why a pre-campaign analysis is worth it:
As marketers it’s tempting to think we’ve invented the wheel, but in all likelihood a campaign with similar goals or aspects to yours has already taken place. Identifying and analysing these can help you to understand and learn from what worked, as well as revealing red flags or potential difficulties in engaging a similar target audience to yours – and how to minimise or even avoid them.
It could be a competitor campaign, or even just a parallel campaign which, while not selling a competing product, ultimately targets a similar audience. Valuable insights can also be taken from analysing previous campaigns carried out by potential collaborators to understand if they are truly the right fit to be associated with your brand and the potential risks or rewards.
If you’re a luxury watch brand looking to collaborate with a sports club for example, you may find that it it will be difficult to maintain buzz and engagement over the course of a campaign due to the mismatch between the sports club’s traditionally wary and protective audience, and the kind of audience that is more likely to be engaged and interested in luxury watches. A nuance that has to be taken into account when deciding if such a collaboration is right for you.
Not all platforms and outlets are equal: your campaign’s target demographic may be more likely to be found on TikTok than it is on Facebook for example, and with those distinctions constantly shifting a pre-campaign analysis makes sure you have the latest information on where you’re most likely to engage and generate buzz among that group.
The analysis will also help you dig deep into how key topics of relevance are engaged with among your target audience: is sustainability important to them or not? Is there fatigue with certain messaging? With the details of key messaging outlined, the right tools and expertise can then identify worthwhile influencers to partner with in order to further increase the likelihood of your campaign getting in front of the right eyes. Securing the right ambassadors can go a long way towards winning over new groups and building brand trust and affiliation.
For campaigns designed to drive more product sales, a pre-analysis is an important piece of preparation to help assess how your current campaign plan could impact purchasing decisions. The data may reveal a campaign to be poorly formulated and likely to have a negative impact on purchases, which demands action to redress those issues before launch, or alternatively, strengthen the assessment that a planned campaign is likely to drive more purchases.
To return to our previous example case, one clear possibility is identifying mismatches in the pricing and angling of a product with the demographic you’re most likely to reach in a collaboration-led campaign: you may believe your campaign collaborator’s audience is right for your luxury products, but if analysis shows that they are more interested in the budget sphere, it’s time to reassess.
The ultimate goal is to save money and resources that would otherwise be wasted playing catch-up by launching the wrong way. You may even find it’s best to avoid an unsuitable campaign in the first place, and go back to the drawing board.
In Summary: Why you should do a pre-campaign analysis
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