A 4-Step Guide to MSP Marketing Postmortems

So, you’ve just completed a marketing campaign, investing your time and money into its successful completion. It’s done… so what do you do now?

For many businesses, it’s time to move on… but smart business owners dwell on their campaigns for a moment, for the real profit comes from the follow-up. Understanding why a campaign performed the way it did—whether it succeeded or failed—is critical to effectively allocating your available funds and achieving the results you want in the future.

Let’s explore how to gain this kind of understanding.

A Proper Postmortem of Your Campaign is an Essential Step to Understanding It

Many business owners often feel their marketing spend is spent blindly, with little idea of what works or how effective it really is at advancing their goals. You may understand this feeling intimately. 

It can make marketing feel like a gamble—just another pull on the slot machines.

Examining your campaign after the fact helps break this pattern. By identifying what worked well and what could use revisiting, you can apply these insights to your marketing efforts and try again. In this way, you can optimize your budget and encourage the success of your future marketing efforts.

Let’s go over how you can do so.

Four Steps to Properly Analyze Your Marketing Campaigns

What follows are the critical practices you should use to improve your marketing efforts after each initiative you enact.

Step 1: Revisit Your Initial Goals

Take the time to reflect on what you wanted to accomplish with your marketing and the approach you ultimately took to achieve it.

For starters, were you pursuing SMART goals? Having a goal is all well and good, but for a goal to be worth your time and effort to pursue, you need to make sure it is a SMART goal, or…

• Specific: Your goals need to be laser-focused on what you want to accomplish. “Improving your business” is a wish, but “improving your business by enhancing customer service” is a strategy.
• Measurable: Tied to your goal’s specificity, you also need to be able to track your progress towards your objective. Therefore, your goals need to be contextualized so they can be measured in clear, specific terms.
• Achievable: There is no sense in making a goal that you have no chance of reaching. Any goal you make needs to be made earnestly, with your full intention of accomplishing it.
• Relevant: Your goal should be tied to your business’ greater success, helping to support your organizational objectives in some way. Otherwise, what’s the point?
• Time-Bound: It is also important that your objective has a stopping point, not one that continues in perpetuity. This helps make measuring your goal’s progress far easier.

These kinds of SMART goals are essential to give yourself a comprehensive view of your progress toward your objective. Speaking of which, you also need to ask yourself what your objective, your purpose, actually is. Whether you’re drumming up interest in your products and services or actively building brand awareness, you need to know what you are trying to accomplish. This will give your campaign a context for judging its success.

Step 2: Pay Attention to What Matters… Your Relevant Key Performance Indicators

With the goals you’ve established in mind, you need to identify the metrics that apply specifically to them.

If Your Goal is Lead Generation, You May Wish to Track…

• Conversion rate, or the percentage of people who completed an action you prompted in your marketing.
• Cost per acquisition, or the cost of exactly one new, qualified lead.

If Your Goal is Brand Awareness, You May Wish to Track…

• Social media engagement, or the volume of likes, shares, and comments you receive, or the increase in followers you experience.
• Website traffic, or the number of new visitors as compared to returning visitors and their path to make it to your site.
• Email metrics, or your open rates and click-through rates.

If Your Goal is Increased Sales, You May Wish to Track…

• Return on investment, or how much you made compared to how much you spent to close a deal.
• Customer lifetime value, or how much a newly acquired client or customer will be worth in total throughout the course of doing business with them.

The metrics that apply to you may vary, depending on your business’ circumstances, your priorities, and again, your goals.

Step 3: Turn Your Figures into Insights

By tracking your applicable KPIs, you should collect quite a bit of data. This data is a goldmine of valuable information and—if you apply it correctly—can help you improve your ongoing marketing efforts. This is where a campaign postmortem really shows its value.

As you analyze this data, it helps to pay attention to a few things:

1. How did this campaign compare to others in the past? Were there any outliers worth paying attention to?
2. What quantitative information (hard facts and figures) and qualitative information (comments and feedback) did you collect, and what does it tell you?
3. Where did your marketing efforts see the most success, and which efforts underperformed?

Using the information you’ve gathered makes it easier to generate more effective strategies, allowing you to rinse and repeat over time. Speaking of which…

Step 4: Act on the Information

Once you’ve collected all your data and drawn your conclusions, it’s time to put it all together. Revisit your strategies and create a revised action plan to follow during your next campaign’s efforts.

To do so, carefully consider what new efforts you’ll introduce, what you’ll keep doing, and what you’ll abandon—and even then, whether you’ll abandon certain efforts or simply tweak them to make them better. Sometimes, the difference between success and failure can be as simple as a word choice or an overly nebulous audience. Adjust, and try again.

Running a Marketing Campaign is Exactly That…a Campaign

A lot of work goes into marketing any business, and this is even more pronounced when the company is service-based and specifically focused on serving other businesses. A managed service provider is a prime example. Marketing takes time and effort… time and effort that a busy MSP may not have, given the demands of answering tickets and configuring business networks.

That said, marketing isn’t something that can be done in half measures.

We completely understand the challenges that an MSP faces, because that’s the other role that we play for ourselves. As such, we’ve had the perspective needed to identify what works when marketing technology services and the opportunity to stress-test it.

We’re here to step in and assist other managed service providers with their marketing from start to finish, from the planning phase to the process we just outlined above.

Find Out How We Can Help You Grow!

Reach out to see how we can help you strategize your marketing, leaning on proven processes and decades of experience. Get started by learning more about our specialized platform by signing up for a free demo now! Let us know you're interested, or give us a call at 888-546-4384 to ask us any questions you have.