Fuel Cycle’s top tips for building insights-driven marketing campaigns

The idea of creating an entire marketing campaign from scratch may sound overwhelming, but it can be a straightforward process if you go about it the right way. It all boils down to gathering feedback from target audiences and strategizing accordingly. If you don’t understand what your audiences’ want or need, or understand how they feel, how can you effectively generate messaging, emails, creatives, or social media posts (to name a few) that resonate with them, or compel them to act? 

Through customer empathy, marketers can validate persona assumptions, identify key desires and challenges, and get feedback on any campaign element—not to mention gain a better sense of what their customers are doing and why, ultimately empowering them to design and execute highly effective campaigns. 

Here are a few steps marketers can take to build insights-driven marketing campaigns:

1. Align campaign goals with audience needs  

Whether you’ve launched a new product, or are looking to increase user engagement or brand awareness, you’ve likely already defined the purpose of your campaign. However, the next step is to ensure that the purpose of your campaign aligns with your audience’s wants or desires, which can be accomplished by conducting needs discovery research. 

Testing your campaign’s goals with target audiences can facilitate alignment, ensuring you truly understand and empathize with your customers. Learn what your customers desire to ensure your messaging and activities meet their needs.

2. Decide how you will measure the success of your campaign 

Conversions and sales are great metrics, but they don't tell you how a customer felt when they signed up for your newsletter or bought an item. Even something as intangible as a customer's feelings can be assigned a metric and benchmarked to show progress over time. 

It will be imperative that you keep the customer journey in mind while defining how you measure success. For instance, you may discover that your customer satisfaction was high when searching for a specific product to buy, and they’re delighted with that element of their shopping experience. However, when it came to checking out, customer satisfaction significantly dropped—so you’ve made some updates to the process and launched a campaign to promote these improvements. In this scenario, you must be sure to keep monitoring and measuring your checkout process experiences to ensure satisfaction rates are trending in the desired direction. 

3. Discover who you are targeting

Your alignment with your audience will make or break your marketing campaign, no matter how creative or brilliant it is. In this stage, you’ll answer questions like: What stage of the buyer’s journey is your campaign targeting? What are your audience's interests? What kind of content gets their attention? What consumer pain points does the product solve? 

Running a customer segmentation study is the most effective way to identify who you’re targeting. Ad campaigns that try to be everything for everyone often cause confusion around brand identity and weakened brand positioning. Learn about the different customer segmentation methods, and decide which one(s) will work best for you. Conducting consumer segmentation and crafting your campaign to a specific persona will have a direct, positive impact on your marketing ROI. 

It’s important not to ignore potential customers outside your target audience as well. Testing your campaign elements with new audiences to gain their perspectives will help ensure you aren’t detracting anyone and may even shape your messaging in a way that will attract new folks and broaden your overall target audience.

Customer feedback solutions to support and measure effective campaigns

With support from the right tools, you can plan, execute, and launch insights-driven marketing campaigns with confidence at each stage. Here are a few ways in which successful marketers utilize market research and customer feedback solutions to strengthen their marketing campaigns:

• Segment your customers and define your campaign’s target audience with a panel, then invite specifically identified individuals into an online community and integrate all their demographic data into every step of research with progressive profiling.
• Learn your target audience’s pain points and desires by running continuous research through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research including surveys, discussion boards, or virtual interviews.
• Have your customers tell you in their own words whether your campaign resonates with them and why or why not. Capture customer sentiment with self-guided interviews and then follow-up with virtual focus groups to further refine your direction.
• Quickly iterate campaign elements to optimize impact by getting fast feedback on emails, banners, videos, social posts, and more with professionally-written templates that launch in minutes.
• Measure ad effectiveness and make adjustments to your campaign strategy in real-time. You can also pair brand health tracking and customer journey data for a full view of how your new ad contributes to the overall brand experience.

Users can first test and refine concepts with fast feedback from the UserTesting Contributor Network, and then scale testing within their Fuel Cycle Communities. With Fuel Cycle’s Community solution and progressive profiling P2 Engine, you can segment your audience, dial in on the right group of individuals for research, and unify all customer information for always up-to-date data that go beyond standard demographics. 

With the confidence of your audience’s validation and backing behind your marketing campaign, you can trust your hard work will perform.