Optimizing your lead campaigns involves a lot of pre-planning. There’s market research to be done, competitor assessments, and plenty of target market analyses. When a campaign is over, it’s all too easy to rush on to the next plan, especially if your campaign didn’t garner the results you had hoped.
But even a campaign that underperformed can still prove useful. You should be in the habit of running a post-mortem analysis after each campaign’s conclusion. Whether you’ve never bothered to run one before or you’re just looking for some tips, this article will provide all the basics you need to know to make your next campaign debrief as impactful as possible.
Don’t forget the positive
It can be easy to slip into a very negative vibe at a post-mortem dissection of your latest marketing campaign. After all, it can be frustrating to revisit all the little things that may have gone wrong.
The ultimate goal of a post-mortem is to be able to do better next time, and so many people get bogged down in the negative. But there’s even more value in identifying what went well. A post-mortem is when you decide which elements of a campaign you’re going to carry on into the next one, and that includes the successes as well as the failures.
Involve everyone
Ideally you should be getting input from everyone on your team. Anyone who had a hand in the new campaign should also get the chance to poke at it while it sits on the autopsy table. It can be tempting to convene with a few team leaders and call it a day, but you’ll get more rounded and honest results if you engage all the employees who were on the front lines.
Involve your clients
This one takes a bit of finesse. Depending on how the campaign went, inviting client feedback may end up being a very harsh experience. It’s up to the team leaders to filter through client comments and pick out the pieces that are truly helpful while casting aside anything excessive.
Ask why
During your discussion, you’ll probably have a list a mile long of all the things that worked well and the things that didn’t. Don’t stop at that. Ask participants to dig deeper into their insights. Why did specific things work well? Why did other aspects go down in flames? Working backwards to find the cause of specific outcomes is what will help you create a game plan for your next campaign.
It’s important to do a post-mortem for every campaign you lead. This consistency will help you better identify trends and issues with your marketing and help get you on the road to higher levels of lead conversion.
