1. Improve campaigns with targeting.

Targeting your marketing efforts is like finding a collection of qualified leads for your campaign. Before you do any work – messaging, channel-development, etc. – you do some pre-work and resolve which market segment you want to reach.

A strategic way to think about targeting is to create marketing or “buyer” personas to describe these various groups of people. With each persona, determine the qualities of this subset. What do they like, and not like? Where do they hang out? What are their common challenges or trouble spots? You’re looking to describe the attributes of several sub-groups of your audience so you can more accurately aim your marketing at them.

2. Improve campaigns by tailoring.

A marketing strategy related to creating personas is tailoring campaigns. This can require both customizing your actual marketing campaign messaging, as well as researching the channels in which you send these messages. Make appropriate variety for your audience.

For instance, in your research, you may discover one collection of your customers eschew print media; for them, you’ll want to develop digital-only campaign materials. Another group may prefer print ads only. You need to know this stuff before you spray a wide swath of marketing into the ether. You want to make sure it’s going to land correctly.

3. Leverage trigger marketing.

If you can meet customers with your campaign at the absolute moment in the buyer’s journey – you’ll likely see more success. This is the concept of “right message at the right time.”

Trigger marketing– sending emails or campaigns at specific points in a customer’s engagement lifecycle – can significantly increase your chance of success.

To set up a trigger campaign, you first need to identify the key points in your customer’s journey, such as discovery, enrollment, first purchase, and/or renewal. Then add additional layers and next steps. For example, after discovery, assuming you can know the customer looked for you and visited your website, you can send them a follow-up: “See anything you like? Come back and visit us.” Or, if you have an existing customer who’s just made a purchase, follow up 30 days later with a reminder.

Marketing automation can help with that (more on that in a moment), but as you can also see, a robust CRM system can be an beneficial tool in trigger marketing.

4. Measure your marketing strategy results – track success.

So, let’s say you’ve conceived, created, and launched your campaign. You’re up and running. Great!

How’s it going? Do you know?

To find out, you must keep tabs on your efforts and properly track them.

This might look like a simple chart (think Excel tables) or a fancier dashboard. Whatever the case, you need to be sure to record what you’re doing – pull the info out of databases and your head – to document it for the future and share with colleagues.

I advise you to limit the pool of info you’re tracking to the few key barometers – KPIs – that really tell the story of your campaign. Endless data is available these days, but make sure you’re keeping an eye on the right data and checking it over and over (apples to apples) regularly.

And write it down! Our memories wane. If you don’t track and document information, it’s like that conventional tree that falls in the forest … no one will know. (They can guess, but they won’t know for sure.)

5. Test to see how well your marketing campaign is performing.

Another key part of concepting and marketing is testing. Don’t forget to build tests into your campaign plans.

You require to measure what is working – and what isn’t.

Tests can be trying and tiring, but they’re also very precious. There are myriad things you can evaluate:

You can test what channel works best. You can test how your web pages are doing, or see how your emails are performing.You can test time of day you publish content – or day of the week.

Tactically, this can look like A/B testing, such as trying different headlines, page designs, or subject lines if email is part of a campaign. It can also look like trying different or new channels or even targeting a new collection of potential customers.

One word of caution: Try to control your tests so there aren’t too many things being evaluated at one time. Just like high school science class, you need to limit the number of constants and variables to glean true insight.

Also, testing isn’t a one-and-done affair. Testing should be done continuously. Don’t rest too long on those laurels. Keep testing – and tracking – to be sure you know what’s working.

6. Toss what doesn’t work.

Once you’ve started testing and tracking, it’s time to take stock. Step back and assess: Is it working? If so, bravo and great job. Time to rinse and repeat.

But, if not, you need to be confident enough to toss it. It’s OK to ditch things that aren’t working and try something new. Remember, you can learn from failure almost as much as – if not more than – success.